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Comment by technotarek | Hacker News Reader

TLRTF (too long, read too fast): they were the greatest thing at the time (especially for cinephiles). Superior contrast, better viewing angles. Disclosure: Former Pioneer plasma TV owner

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Yeah I bought a Panasonic plasma TV in 2006 when I got married and at the time LCD was in its infancy, very jerky and barely watchable. The only advantage of LCD at the time was that plasma was not available in sizes below 38" and was slightly more expensive. Furniture has changed too since then; with HD it's unlikely that you'll be anything below 45" these days.

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.

And 5 minutes later oled came out, viewing angles improved, brightness of 100nits wasn’t cutting it, and they were not worth it. They had a moment. Edit: my point is that there is no mystery in the article. What happened with them? Nothing. The technology was only good in that context, like many others, but it wasn’t any holy grail once LCDs improved a bit.

More like 5 years later.

OLEDs at the TV sizes came years after plasma. You could make it natural upgrade.

If you had one with 100 nits, you got defective unit.

FTA:

Even the best plasma TVs could only reach just over 100 nits of peak brightness in a 10% window test.

It wasn't that bad (I had one).

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.

The article is shit, but all I could find is that RTings measured 80 nits on some plasma TV. So it wouldn't surprise me. But this is fine. OLED is low brightness too. And CRTs can be adjusted down. This is one of the advantages of not using an LCD. LCDs are too bright. The sole use for their brightness is to be able to be used in sun light in the afternoon but why would you not just close the curtains at that point instead of getting fried. Brightness is literally what the guy at the electronics store uses to try and sell you this vs that monitor.

OLED is "low brightness" at 200-300 nits. 100 means that if there's any ambient light at all, the contrast ratio is ruined.

I don't think that means that. I have a CRT I keep around 100 nits and it still has an order of magnitude higher quality color with a lamp behind me to the side.

Plasma panels age. The last models were rated for 60,000 hours lifespan (to lose half of their brightness).

So if they measured some 10-15 years old panel that spent most of its life being turned on, there's your answer.

It was more than a moment. For roughly a decade, your options were Plasma, LCD, or rear projection (or briefly hi-def CRT which was pretty wild).

There was not much overlap of consumer-priced plasma and OLED panels.

For anybody that truly cared about picture quality above all else, Plasma ruled for many years. This is easily validated by going back to reviews/AV forum discussions of Pioneer and Panasonic plasmas around 2008 -> 2012. One big thing to also remember, that I think gets forgotten is that in that time period there was still a huge amount of SD content being produced/viewed, in the era before vaguely decent post-processing, Plasma made much of this material watchable/enjoyable on the larger screen sizes. LCDs would generally produce an awful mess, especially with the early/janky picture processing they employed when viewing SD content, especially 24fps content - many plasmas had native 24fps modes, specifically designed for handling lower frame rate content.

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.

The interesting thing is that plasmas died before OLED was really born; you couldn't get a sensible OLED at the time that the last plasma was discontinued.

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