A Crash Course in Plasma

Home theater television is officially taking a major step back. As of yesterday, Panasonic confirmed that two of its three plasma panel factories have stopped production, with the third closing within the month. This makes the death of plasma all but official, as Panasonic was the last quality manufacture in the space since Pioneer discontinued its Kuro line a few years ago. As a home theater enthusiast, this is almost criminal in my eyes. Be it the midrange Panasonic set I recently purchased for school, or the $7000 Kuro Elite I have back home, for years I have been using and advocating plasma over LCD sets to anyone who will listen. I want to do that one last time, in a desperate attempt to spread awareness about plasma before it is completely wiped from the face of this earth.
I'm going to try and keep this in as plain English as possible, so if there are any other hardcore plasma guys in class reading this, please forgive me if I dumb something down too much.

The advantages of plasma over LCD are numerous (although it may be more accurate to say that the LCD has far more negatives than plasma), but the one that stands out the most is black levels.

Creating true black on a television is hard, if not impossible. It is also arguably the most important color that a TV needs to recreate. LCD televisions cannot, and will never be able to, accurately recreate black on a television set. This is because of their inherent design.

Every LCD TV has a grid array of tiny liquid crystals which can each change shape. They twist to allow varying degrees of light that shines from behind them (usually an LED light) to come through and produce the image on screen. Each of these pixels is made up of three sub-pixel crystals, one for red, green, and blue. The amount of light that is allowed to pass through each of these colors will create the corresponding color of the pixel that is needed to create the image. The key thing here is the backlight. No matter what the color, the LCD television is shooting light out from behind it. This is terrible when you want to create something dark, and terrible when you want to have contrast between bright and dark areas on screen simultaneously.

In the above picture, compare the "blackness" on the plasma televisions, such as the Kuro's in the center, to the LCD sets on the right side. The difference is night and day (and what's supposed to be night may very well seem like day on an LCD TV).

Why can plasma perform so much better with the color black? There's no backlight.

Every plasma screen is made up of a grid array of tiny gas-filled cells. Each pixel contains a set of three phosphor-coated sub-pixels, one for red, green, and blue. When the plasma gas inside each cell is charged, the phosphor coating is light up and the relevant color light is produced. Whereas LCD is a backlight technology, plasma pixels have self-emitting light. When they want to produce black (thus, zero light) they just do not activate at all. The pixel is off, and a nearly true representation of black can be produced as a result. This makes movies look like they were intended, something LCD will never be capable of.

This quality has many other consequences compared to LCD. Contrast ratios are the most obvious. I'm sure when you bought your LCD set from Best Buy you got it because it has a 20,000,000 to 1 "dynamic contrast ratio", but unfortunately that sort of statistic is a marketing gimmick. Those numbers are given by the manufacturer comparing the ratio of a completely white screen (the brightest it can be) to a completely black screen (the darkest it can be). It is meaningless. Plasma sets contrast ratios are rated based on the difference between black and white on a television set simultaneously. Since light on plasma is constrained to individual pixels, plasma's excel at this statistic.

The list goes on and on, from response time to cost of ownership, plasma excels in just about every category. I could write a book about it and bore you to death, but I suggest you go do some research yourself if you consider yourself a movie, television, video game, or sports fan. Plasma is king. I highly recommend you purchase one of the last Panasonic sets before it is too late.