Whatever Happened to Plasma TVs?
howtogeek.com
howtogeek.com
I have a 720 Samsung plasma circa 2011 that looks better than cheap 1080p LED from a few years ago. I will likely replace it with a 4K OLED in the next year or two and will keep ut one for a other decade or so.
The most compelling reason for the upgrade was that when I use the TV in "computer screen mode" it just didn't have enough pixels for the 1080 pixel count that is standard these days in computer land. But I had to get the OLED tech to match the color quality of the twelve year old plasma.
Of course, I also configured the Internet access. This also included testing that Netflix etc. was working smoothly. When the stream reached the highest quality level after a few seconds, I was extremely surprised by the sharpness of the image, the clarity and also the color rendering.
It was of course an "old" plasma TV, which makes my panel in the TV at home look pretty bad.
The biggest downside to it? It put out a tremendous amount of heat. It got to where I didn't like using it during the summer because it would heat up the room. It was basically like running a space heater.
This isn't an issue with plasma screens as you get some natural motion blur with the pixel response times giving a smoother overall presentation.
You can somewhat alleviate the stutter on OLEDs using motion processing on low (or using special "cinema" settings on newer models) but it isn't perfect as it introduces slight artifacts which also suck plus the smoothing gives ever-so-slight soap opera effect that wasn't present on plasma screens.
However for gaming that near instant pixel response for 60 or 120fps games is freaking awesome. You really can't beat OLED for a gaming display. Just amazing.
(And what if you want crisp motion, e.g. for 60p sports broadcasts compared to slow panning shots? Let's not go too far to praise one inferior technology for hiding problems of another one!)
Size, as far as I am aware, is not an issue. My OLED is 65" and my final plasma was 60" so similar enough to size plus the same is true on a 55" OLED (and even smaller).
One thing to check is that it's not judder from a frame rate mismatch or dodgy motion smoothing. Usually if something is noticeably jarring, it's judder rather than frame rate.
It can be notoriously difficult to get these settings to do what you want on most TVs. For me, I always want "no motion smoothing but with automatic dejuddering enabled", which can be almost impossible, or even impossible in the case of some Samsung TVs.
Worse, some device/app combinations seem to just introduce their own judder. For example BBC iPlayer is awful for judder and stuttering, and Amazon Prime on Android TV seems to struggle with some shows sometimes. Android TV is a bit janky in general. Apple+ on Apple TV is always perfect.
What I normally do to conclusively check for judder is I use the slow motion video on my phone to record at 1/8th to look for duplicated frames or other weirdness.
Interestingly, I believe some amount of subtle panning judder is actually created by cinematic filming. Convention is to use a 180 degree shutter, which means each frame only has half the expected motion blur. 180 degrees is usually the best for 24Hz, but it can make certain types of panning shot look a bit unnatural IMO.
https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-...
So what are you claiming, that some slower pixel response times act as interpolation? Then just interpolate. Insert frame 1.5 (1 and 2 overlayed on top of each other with 50% opacity) between 1 and 2. Still not smooth enough? Just add more interpolation. There is literally no difference between this and slow pixel transitions that supposedly were timed such that they hide the choppiness. You can even do this all in software and hook it up to the TV. And of course OLED TVs can handle this as long as they allow higher refresh rates. Also some OLEDs just have this built in. Enjoy your soap operas.
> This isn't an issue with plasma screens as you get some natural motion blur with the pixel response times giving a smoother overall presentation.
I thought plasma pixel transitions are as fast as CRT?
Have you been to cinemas?
Or that the move from HD to 4K is near-worthless without a framerate increase?
Maybe it's not bad enough to match your personal definition of 'choppy', but 24fps is an unfortunate compromise made in the days when you had to feed costly physical film into movie cameras.
And now everyone is so familiar with 'the cinematic look', we're stuck with 'movies should look like that, as that's how they've always looked', anything different is assumed to be worse, and we're never going to learn how to do high-framerate filmmaking well as the early attempts were so quickly rejected.
Same here with my ~5 years old LG C6V: in my case it's funny that it has especially a problem with anything that is a bit small and which flies, being birds or helicopters etc... => they're often displayed garbled or with split upper/lower sections. Weird.
Would it be nice to have a 4k transfer from the original 35mm? Yes. Can you get that from the film licensees? Not necessarily.
I also paid $60 for it. Hard to beat.
The worst problem I had with it was that, like all plasmas, I can see a high frequency flickering on them, especially in my peripheral vision.
The second worst problem is they're not very bright.
I have a LG C1 now and love it (though there are a few minor issues with that too!).
And yeah, it's not exceedingly bright, but I've only ever noticed the issue if there's direct sunlight shining on it, which is pretty rare.
I am quite sensitive to flicker in general, though. I see it on DLPs, CFL bulbs and even a lot of LEDs that use PWM. For example, in my area a lot of the new tunnel LED lights have flicker in my peripheral vision, which can be a bit disorienting.
With the Viera, it was worse in a bright room (perhaps due to my pupils being smaller) so my solution was to try and keep the room dim when the TV was in use, but that wasn't always feasible.
Don't want to pay a lot up front. You'll pay a lot to run it.
1W x 24h/d x 365d = 8760Wh
8.76kWh x 0.3525€/kWh = 3.09€Simple solution is to just turn the TV off when you're not watching it. Cut viewing time back to 1-3h/day and you're under 200 euro's per year. Don't forget that large LCD TV's use more power too, so you're not going to be able to save all of that by replacing it with an LCD.
> Power prices in Germany are among the highest in Europe. The high costs partly are due to the mandatory support for renewable energy sources – but most customers continue to support the country's energy transition regardless [result of some web search]
Fuck outta here with this. As I stated, 500W is nothing. The alternatives (half-working LEDs) are pure garbage. You are all propagandized idiots still consuming and trashing at the same rate but now buying stuff because it's """green""" (TM) while the company knows they are not fixing anything.
The LG is hands down better for games, but everything else tends to look a bit off. The response time is just too quick for movies and video to appear natural. There is filmmaker mode that makes this a lot better, but it is still there.
I will add that another part of the issue is that it is almost too good in terms of response time and motion handling. There is not enough blurring. Everything appears so sharp and crisp and motion resolution is so high that movie sets look like movie sets. When something isn’t real in the scene it is very clear. It is a problem of OLEDs being beyond the technology films are shot for. No one expects that you will be able to see everything in sharp detail during fast moving scenes.
Sorry, what does this mean?
From my understanding (could be very wrong) when you playback video you just display every frame still for 1/framerate seconds. Why would response time affect it in any way, especially the bad way?
It looks good for sports and video games, but films proper make a lot of specific choices about frame rate vs motion blur, which these filters just crush out of existence if they're cranked up too high. A very good scene to see this clearly is the opening of Saving Private Ryan.
I'm not sure if it's the sum of money they spent originally or a real difference, but my mother in law still prefers the plasma TV.
Has anyone had similar very positive feelings towards plasma versus recent new TV's?
The downsides of plasma are weight, heat, and screen burn. (Though OLEDs get screen burn too.)
That is a bar that moves every few years as well.
But you had to be careful, it didn't like static pictures, they could burn in, similarly to OLEDs later. If you watched movies, it was not a problem. If you let some station run 24/7, with static logo somewhere, that could be a problem.
The actual pixels made their own light, which meant that if they were dim or off, they were off - most LED screens until recently just have a backlight (or a backlight with sections) and so in a dark room on a black screen you can see the light leak through.
It disturbs me how millions of plasma TVs would have been made. Now they are unwanted with nowhere to go. I like to imagine a highly efficient recycle program would strip them down for parts. In reality I suspect most end up in landfill and aren't much value in the recycle business.
This is an important point. My household uses very little power and when we eventually switched out our old plasma TV after a decade or so of use, our power bill halved. It's hard to pin it all on the TV because this is hardly a scientific experiment but that was the only notable change during that period.
(EU electricity prices. With increasing prices expected it is probably going to take less than originally estimated.)
My indestructible TV (it has survived my son's first 3 years of life, so far) set has 3D and I remember having fun even playing games with this feature.
What happened to 3D is a mystery to me.
Let's not forget nvidia also tried to capitalize on the whole scam with their 3d vision crap. Oh, was shown more than a few 30hz per eye demos by clueless promoters and tech enthusiasts.
At least it paved the way to high refresh monitors which are now mainstream but were frowned upon back in the day. Sometimes society catches up
You could do 60 per eye on 120 hz monitors. Just not on TVs. In any case, even 60hz per eye is a horrible flicker fest to me. Had enough of that back in CRT days.
I paid $5,000 ($7,100 in 2022).
It weighs 95 lbs. (with stand) but who cares since it's been sitting in the same place for 15 years.
The picture in early 2008 (after professional calibration after 4 months of use) was mind-blowingly great — and remains so 15 years later, so much so that when I take a trip every couple years to a high-end TV store like Crutchfield to see how the various bleeding-edge TVs look, they're STILL not nearly as good.
I've been ready to "upgrade" to a 4K OLED for years now but the Pioneer refuses to die or degrade.
The only thing wrong with it is that for the past 3-4 years only 1 of the 3 HDMI inputs still works so I have to manually switch it between my cable box and Apple TV.
Exploiting this aggressively helped Samsung win market share and become a top TV manufacturer, causing Panasonic and Pioneer to exit the business, and nearly kill off Sony. Their only real competition is on the low end with Vizio, HiSense, TCL, etc.
OLED still can’t match these margins, which is why only LG really makes them in large quantities. Others, including Samsung are dipping into OLED to capture the videophile market but not selling the sheer volume or making huge profits on them.
Yes, LEDs are hugely cheaper to manufacturer, allowing them to be priced at a point more suitable for mass markets, where people care more about price than quality (of LED compared to Plasma).
I'm still running a 13 year old LCD TV in a guest bedroom. Just the thought of trying to either sell or see it end up in a landfill upsets me.
Motion. I say motion is quite important.
CRT was better than Plasma even though Plasma was quite good.
LCD is basically PC monitor technology and it uses sample and hold, totally unsuitable for movie motion.
OLED, while great in other ways, 24p-motion still sucks, its easily the worst thing about the technology.
What technology will have all the modern good stuff and have CRT/Plasma like motion?
But seriously, would these be any less efficient than an electric baseboard heater?
If the repurposed plasma screen heater is consuming 400W, is it releasing 400W of heat?
However, we have better ways of heating. An AC unit running in heat mode, or an air source heat pump, will move 4x the heat into your room than it takes in electricity to run. So although running a plasma is equal to running a resistive baseboard heater, if you want the best bang for your kWh you should get a minisplit air conditioner or air source heat pump.
No. Of course, those aren't very efficient.
An LG C1 with HLG or other service-menu tricks is the only thing to surpass it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19EI9UjRwRs but they cost way more than an old plasma on the used marketplace.
I also more recently got a C1 for the living room to replace a cheapy Hisense that started wigging out, and sometimes I think to myself that I should have saved xxxx dollars and just gotten another used plazzy off FB marketplace…
I really like the screen quality we get with it. Haven’t had much reason to replace it in the 10 or so years we’ve owned it.
My main TV is a Plasma 42” from Panasonic, I bought cheap when Plasmas where being discontinued many years ago and it’s still going strong and despite only being 720p, looks fantastic, much better than a lot of other TV’s that I see which are 4K.
I hate how complex TV’s have become, I love this because it’s simple, looks great and makes it easy to watch content, for years I just copied what I wanted to USB and watched, but now I added a google chrome with Google TV and Plex.
If you had one with 100 nits, you got defective unit.
Even the best plasma TVs could only reach just over 100 nits of peak brightness in a 10% window test.
But the article also compares them to todays LCDs with 1000 nits. LCDs at the time weren't so bright either, they were about so bright as plasmas, but unlike plasmas, they also were gray goo.
So if they measured some 10-15 years old panel that spent most of its life being turned on, there's your answer.
There was not much overlap of consumer-priced plasma and OLED panels.
Lots of those Pioneer/Panasonic plasmas all had "hidden" service menus that allowed people tweak/calibrate all sorts of picture variables to their hearts content as well, which rightly or wrongly, probably also helped give them a certain love within cinephile type groups.
I still have it in fact, I don't like how power hungry it is but it doesn't really matter for the very little time that I watch TV (which is mostly during the day in the weekend, when my electricity is self produced solar anyway). That said it's probably time to get a new OLED TV and I am just waiting for the day that I will need new furniture.