But will it be plasma or LCD? There are differences
Marc Saltzman
Province
LCD TVs, like this $2,500 Samsung 32-inch TV, are outselling plasmas three to one in Canada. — CANWEST NEWS SERVICE
You’re finally ready to ditch that aging cathode ray tube TV you bought when The Cosby Show was king. In its place will be a gorgeous widescreen high-definition set, you decide, and better yet, one of those flat ones to hang on the wall.
Yes, that would look just perfect — and be the perfect excuse to ditch that ugly painting you received from your “artistic” sister-in-law.
With credit card in pocket and smile on your face, you march to your local electronics store, only to be dismayed by a sea of flat-panel televisions that extend as far as the eye can see.
How on earth can you decide which one is for you?
Buying a new television these days isn’t an easy task. But if you’ve decided to go with a flat HDTV set — after all, once you go flat, you never go back — then you’ve already narrowed down the purchase to a plasma television or a flat-panel LCD television.
Plasma TVs contain an array of tiny cells, referred to as pixels, which contain phosphors corresponding to the colours red, green and blue. A mixture of trapped neon and xenon gases are then stimulated by an electrical current, thus producing a rich and vibrant picture to the viewer on the other side of the glass.
Similar to your laptop computer’s monitor, flat-panel LCD televisions use a “liquid crystal display” to produce a sharp and bright picture; liquid crystals are sandwiched between two panes of polarized glass, which are stimulated by an electric current and illuminated by fluorescent tubes housed behind the glass.
Panasonic, a “technology agnostic” company that sells both plasma and flat-panel LCDs, believes there is a market for both products.
“We’re seeing LCD televisions, which are available in smaller sizes, as a replacement for those who have a CRT television, while plasma tends to be a replacement to larger rear-projection televisions,” says Barry Murray, director of marketing for audio/video products at Panasonic Canada.
Murray maintains, however, plasma offers a better overall video experience over LCD in three key areas: contrast ratio, colour and in its ability to represent motion.
Contrast ratio — which refers to how white the whites are or how blacks the blacks are — is usually better in plasma televisions (such as 10,000:1 contrast ratio over 3000:1) because LCD televisions are a backlit-driven technology, therefore you have a fluorescent light that’s on all the time behind the crystals. With plasma, if you want pure black, you don’t activate that cell.
Murray says plasma offers more accurate colour reproduction than LCD, resulting in a more “organic”-looking picture.
While LCD televisions are getting better at displaying fast motion, such as a hockey game, their refresh rates are poorer than plasma. Unless the television has relatively low response times, viewers may see “ghosting” or trails following a fast-moving object.
But Chris Matto, Marketing Manager at Sharp Electronics Canada, one of the leading manufacturers of flat-panel LCD televisions, disagrees with some of Murray’s claims.
For one, Matto says plasma used to be the only player above 42 inches, but this is not the case any more.
“There’s a few good reasons why LCD televisions are outselling plasma TVs more than three to one in Canada, and one of them is that unlike plasma, which starts at about 37 inches, LCD TVs are available in screen sizes from 13 inches to 65 inches” says Matto.
Oreste De Vincenzo, Samsung’s Consumer Display Product
Marketing Manager, mirrors Matto’s sentiment: “Up until last year, there was a distinct differentiation between LCD and plasma models: LCDs covered the 13- to 40-inch range, while plasma was primarily available in 42-inch and larger sizes” says De Vincenzo.
© The Vancouver Province 2006
