JJ Lighting & Electrical - Home Electrical Centre

If ever a product or technology came to market prematurely, it’s the plasma television set. Way back in the late 1990s, Plasma was shown to the public at technology shows and major sporting events, and were the talking point of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan. The sudden availability of these new large screens, and their extremely shallow depth, opened up a world of possibilities for home cinema and modern interior design. Despite the huge price tag at the time, demand amongst the wealthy was huge and sales took off.

However, because the price was so high, the technology was under close scrutiny. You could argue that plasmas hadn’t really had a chance to be properly developed, and the teething troubles you get with any new form of technology had not yet been ironed out. After a year or two, horror stories about reliability started to emerge and plasma was tarred with a reputation it has struggled to overcome. However, plasma has changed. Panasonic and Philips have been driving the further development and much like any technology it has evolved. The plasma televisions we see today bear little relation to the products we saw five or ten years ago. So, what were these horror stories and how have things changed?

“They need re-gassing every two years.” - This is the most perpetuating myth. It is certainly true that early plasma panels had problems with the gas they used, and they tended to fail after a year or two. Couple that with the price-tag at the time and it’s no surprise that owners were furious. However, this simply isn’t the case any more. A modern Panasonic plasma television, for example, is quoted as having a panel life of 100,000 hours. To put that into context that’s 35 YEARS at 8 HOURS a day! It’s also nearly double the panel life of the average LCD, which is generally quoted as 60,000 hours.

“They consume twice as much energy as an LCD TV.” – Again, in the past this was certainly true. Older plasma panels did consume more electricity than an equivalent size LCD TV, but again Panasonic has gone a long way to reverse this trend. Firstly, it is worth noting that when an LCD television is powered up, it has a backlight that is permanently illuminated, rather like a fluorescent tube. This means a dark image consumes as much power as a light image. With plasma, the screen only uses power when a pixel is lit, therefore a starry sky will use a lot less energy than a sun-splashed landscape. Even taking this into account, previous generation plasma sets still used more energy than LCD. The problem is compounded by the fact that a manufacturer is legally required to specify the maximum wattage an appliance will use, regardless of how often it will actually consume that wattage.

However, the new NEO-PDP ranges from Panasonic offer images TWICE as bright as previous models, whilst consuming HALF the power. Add to that the ECO mode which automatically adjusts the brightness (and power consumption) according to the light level in the room, and the difference in consumption between Plasma and LCD is negligible. If the environment is your concern it’s also worth noting that most plasmas, including the entire Panasonic range, are now 100% lead-free.

“They get really bad screen burn.” – Screen burn, for those lucky enough to have never seen it, is permanent damage caused to a television from displaying static images for too long. This is most commonly seen in old video game arcades. On machines that don’t get played very often, the words “Insert coin” often get burned onto the screen, and are visible even once you have inserted a coin and started playing (not ideal for alien bashing!). The screen burn issue on plasmas manifested itself when television channels such as Sky and FIVE starting putting “channel icons” in the top left of the screen. It was noted that after some time watching the same channel, these markers would “burn” themselves in place, and would remain visible no matter what you watched. Again, this was a direct result of the old technology and materials plasma used to use, and since those dark days manufacturers have almost eradicated the problem. I say almost because, as with ANY display panel, you should always avoid displaying a bright, static image for an extended period of time. Old CRT tube style televisions suffered from it, and I’ve seen many a cheap LCD showing strong signs of screen burn too. The key is to never “pause” any TV for extended periods, such as the pause function on Sky+ or a video game. If you decide to use your plasma or LCD TV as a PC monitor, always use a screensaver. If you follow those two rules, you should never suffer screen burn in normal use.

“Plasma is old technology, LCD is the future” – This is perhaps the most peculiar rumour. For a start LCD is the older of the two technologies, and has been used with varying degrees of success in PC monitors for some years. PC monitors generally don’t concern themselves with realistic colours or good viewing angles, and this is where many of the cheaper LCD sets really suffer. LCD technology was originally intended for word-processing and other applications on a computer, and is quite simply very hard to adapt to give good results as a television on a budget. High-quality LCD sets now look very good, but still cannot compete with a plasma for sheer realism. Plasma tends to give deeper blacks, faster refresh rates, more natural colours, and above all it costs less pound-for-pound.

If anything then, buying a large-screen LCD is a compromise, and if that decision is based upon the myths above then hopefully you’ll understand why Plasma has changed, and why you’d be mad to dismiss it. A lot of people consider the fact that Sony, Samsung and a number of other manufacturers don’t offer a plasma. This is a result of them pulling out of the market when the early problems arose, and it is cheaper for them to market their LCDs more aggressively than restart development on their own plasma systems. Panasonic and a couple of others have always seen the potential for the highest-quality picture with plasma and as such have developed a product that has now surpassed LCD for lifespan, depth of colour and fast response time. It’s too late now for Sony to re-enter the plasma market, but Panasonic in particular has invested millions of dollars to ensure it’s the technology of the future. Ourselves, and most of the TV and hi-fi magazines, tend to agree.