LCD vs. Plasma vs. DLP
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can someone explain the differences to me, im going tv shopping for a flat panel and want to know whats good and what isnt.
oh and btw, if your going to give a smart ass comment like they are all good or its just a tv who cares...just keep it to yourself.
thanks, jon
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Well right now, everyone is phasing out Plasma TV's in favor of LCD's.
Chuck will be able to give you a better technical breakdown of whats best but here is what I know. Contrast Ratio comparisons between brands is not feasable as different brands use different methods to measure it, so 2000:1 could be 10,000:1 for some other brand...higher doesn't necessarily mean better. Your best bet is to go off what you feel looks best.
Plasmas can be had for pretty cheap now since I think a lot of retailers are just trying to get rid of their stock of them.
DLP is a projection screen, it's the most affordable "large" TV you will find. The BIG drawback is that you have to replace the expensive bulb in them every several thousand hours vs no bulb changes in a Plasma/LCD.
That's all I know. I am an LCD fan myself.
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amicheze;216885 wrote:
I thought plasmas wore out after a few years?Nope, just a myth.
DelSlow;216886 wrote:
you have to recharge plasma TV after a couple years and sometimes that can cost almost what the TV cost you.LCD > Plasma.
/end thread.
I wouldn't say end thread here, people have a lot to learn about tvs.
Again, myth. Do some reasearch, there is no "recharging" or whatever people say. You would have to leave your tv on for YEARS before it lost color or brightness. Honestly, who is going to have the same TV 10 years from now?
I doubt plasmas are being phased out. Some of the best manufacturers on the market ONLY make plasmas.
Oh another thing you will hear about plasmas is that you will get "burn in" if you play video games or whatever. Some brands now have a nice little feature that will actually shift the picture a pixel or 2 so that this can not happen. No worries there.
One good thing to look at while checking out tvs, is to look and see how dark the black is on the tv. Most will look dark gray at best, you want black, not dark gray.
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Ok, I am gonna write a book here....
DLP is pretty much no more, alot of TV manufacturer's have stopped with projection
LCD uses a liquid crystal substrate with color filters on the panels, and a backlight that is constantly on. This is the reason that the contrast ratios in LCD is so bad. More on that later. Also, LCDs have the ability to use a soft plastic front screen, that does not reflect light nearly as harshly as glass.
Plasmas use "plasma cells" to display the picture. The easiest way to describe this is that each pixel of the tv is more or less a small lightbulb. This is good because the response time is very fast (think flipping a light on and off quickly), and when they are off, there is no emitted light so blacks are generally much deeper on a plasma. The downside is they have to use a glass front panel, so there is still the possiblity of glare.
LCD is not "blocky"..that is distortion caused by the digital signal not being sent to the TV fast enough/the TV not processing the signal fast enough...happens on all digital TV's; projection, LCD, and plasma. However, most LCDs right now use a 60Hz panel. That means the panel is able to refresh the picture 60 times a second. For some sports/fast motion scenes, the LCD substrate cannot change fast enough to keep up. This will cause a "trail of blur" following the fast motions. This has now been corrected, as the new LCD technology for 2007 is 120Hz panels. This effectively doubles the refresh ability of LCD's to keep up in high motion scenes that rival plasmas.
Pioneer no longer makes their own panels....they have started to outsource them, i believe, to Matsushita, which is essentially panasonic
Contrast ratio is important, but is also used alot for marketing. First off, contrast ratio is a measurement between the "blackest black" a tv can show, and the "whitest white". The larger the ratio, the more shades the tv can display, and essentially the more colors. StangerBanger is somewhat right on there not being an industry standard. There is, but it is measured 2 different ways. The way everyone advertises with now is the least important of the two. That is dynamic contrast. dyanmic contrast is the highest possible contrast the tv can possibly show. that means the perfect scene with the perfect tv settings...how often do you think you will come across that? static contrast ratio is the important one, but also almost impossible to find out as most manufacturers dont even list it in their specifications anymore. static contrast is the amount of contrast at any given time, no matter what the picture. generally speaking, plasmas will have a higher contrast ratio than lcds(refer to description of plasmas above). To see this, when you look at the two side by side, look at the colors and see which has bolder colors. Now, people can be fooled by lcds to draw their attention to them also. with lcds, alot of stores will turn the brightness of the backlight up to draw attention to the tv, because generally people with think subconciously that a brighter picture = better picture. not always true. Alot of times, the brighter pictures of the lcds will have a more washed out color than the plasmas.
You do not have to recharge plasma tvs, nor do they go out in a couple years. They are on their 9th generation of panels right now, and most panels are rated for a 60,000 hour half-life, meaning that in 60,000 hours, the tv will be at half its original brightness, and deemed too dark to watch. Plasmas are not being phased out, nor are stores clearancing them. Plasmas are cheaper because of manufacturing processes. It costs companies alot of money to produce/cut the panels for lcd, plus alot of manufacturers(sony/samsung(which are made in the same factory in japan)) use 3 panels each with a different filter color, so you have 3 large lcd panels in each tv. larger plasmas are cheaper to make than larger lcds.
Burn in can still happen, but not very easily. you have about as much chance burning in a plasma tv as you do a tube tv, and yes, tube tv's can burn in. Burn in can also be reversed if you catch it early enough, but do not do this often as it is
hard on the life of your plasma. If you manage to burn it in, play something bright white on the screen, ie hockey or you can order "whiteout" dvds online (just a blank white picture) that will "wash out" the burn in. AGAIN, hard on the plasma cells, doing it often will decrease the life of the panel, but no measurement of how much.When it comes down to it, just like everything else, you get what you pay for. Cheap tvs will have a slower respose time, burn in easier and go out quicker. Hope this helped, I have been selling tv's for the last 6 years or so, but i prolly forgot something being I am tired as hell right now. And if your in grand forks, come buy the damn tv from me @ dakota tv lol
/end plug
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I have a Samsung 40 inch LCD and its nice. I think you will like the pic quality from a lcd.
Understeer is when you hit the wall with the front of the car
Oversteer is when you hit the wall with the rear of the car.
Horsepower is how fast you hit the wall
Torque is how far you take the wall with you -
FYI if you go DLP... make sure you get LCD projection... some makes still use a color wheel , a small percentage of people will get whats called the rainbow effect... its when you move you eyes following the picture you will see a brief red blue and green shaddow... i am one of those people... and it sucks
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Parker;216927 wrote:
FYI if you go DLP... make sure you get LCD projection... some makes still use a color wheel , a small percentage of people will get whats called the rainbow effect... its when you move you eyes following the picture you will see a brief red blue and green shaddow... i am one of those people... and it sucksDLP and LCD projection are actually two different kinds of projection...and there is a third kinda also called LCOS(liquid crystal on silicone).
all DLP tv's use a color wheel, spinning at ~1200rpm. these can go bad(samsung is known for their colorwheels going out after 2-3 years). yes, there is the rainbow effect, but they have a very fast response time, almost no motion blurring.
LCD projection is like a lightbulb shining through small lcd panel. on these you get what is called the "screendoor effect". you see the lines between the pixels.
LCOS is kind of like a combination of lcd and dlp technologies, and is by far the best rear projection technology out. the sony sxrd's( arguably one of the best rear pj's ever made) uses lcos.
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I know COD4 looks amazing on Troy's Pioneer Plasma hahaha.
Plasma > Expensive LCD > Cheap LCD
You do get what you pay for in an LCD panel as well... The picture quality on my Aquos is amazing as well.
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Plasma TV's are nice in the fact that they can get the true deep blacks meant to be shown. But If not put in a dark lit room they will have a reflective glare since it has a glass front rather than a LCD has a monitor front and is a TV that can be used in many different locations. They still look amazing they just wont have those really rich blacks like a plasma does. DLP is dead technology stay away. They are big TV's that will be off the market in a matter of a year.
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a few companies, like panasonic, offer plasmas that have an anti-reflective coating that actually cuts down the glare pretty significantly
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I personally have a 42 inch plasma made by LG. I love the tv and I was in the same pickle your in with what to pick. I just went to best buy and found the one i liked the best out of the LCD or Plasma, and it was the plasma. Find one you like, thats just my .02. Good luck!!
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Im not much of a plasma fan because if you play a game for a while with a HUD or a game like rock band it will be burned into the tv for like a day or two...not really a big deal but it can be pretty annoying when your watching tv and you can read "team deathmatch" in the corner lol.
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For the glare issue, thats easy, get a tilting wall bracket, or something similar. I watch w/ the blinds open all the time and dont have glare problems, but I know some do. If you have a GOOD plasma, your room doesn't need to be dark either.
And on the video game subject, I personally haven't seen that yet. My tv has had HOURS upon HOURS for weeks in a row, with COD4 played on it and not one issue of burn in.
In the end it comes down to personal opinion and budget. Go shop around, and look at all that you can, and get what YOU like. Keep in mind that some places have a very good HD feed to all their TVs and some dont. Oh and DON'T buy expensive HDMI cables either!
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I don't like paying big coin for TVs so I started using a front projection setup a few years ago. My first deal was an Infocus X1 DLP projector running 800x600. For $800 I had a 72" diagonal screen, with single-addressible pixels (connected via VGA to my theater-PC).
Eventually I wanted higher resolution and a quieter unit. The DLP color wheel and cooling fan for the projection bulb were quite noisy. I replaced the X1 with the BenQ W500 720p 3-LCD projector. That one is 720p native, and doesn't have a color wheel, so it's higher resolution and quiter. It also has an HDMI jack on it so I can roll digital all the way to the screen.
Interestingly enough, the W500 must have a more aggressive projection ratio than the X1 since my old screen is no longer big enough. I'm moving into a different house and so I'll be building a different screen anyway.
You cannot touch the screen size / dollar ratio of a front projection setup. The only drawback is you need a dark room. Our TV room is in our basement so controlling the light is no problem. I don't have normal tv/cable subscription; we only use it for DVDs, Xbox, and torrented anime, all of which look great. A fair bit of the stuff I watch is now 720p so there doesn't need to be any pixel resampling.
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^Maybe it was just an old plasma tv that I was using...But as thrash said, projection FTW. We have a panosonic (not sure of model off hand) 1080p projector and it is the greatest thing, its really crisp. But you do need a somewhat dark room and if someone turns on the lights it is hard to see, and if you couldnt mount it too a ceiling it would suck.
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