I did a lot of research before I went for my Samsung LCD a couple of years ago. Plasma's produce deeper blacks but LCD's produce brighter whites. Plasma's can also suffer from screen burn wheras LCD's can't and some Plasma's can make a noticable hum especially when producing light bright screens as this takes the most energy. LCD's can have a clouding effect depending on how they are backlit. I have my own concerns about Plasma's, my sister had one at home that developed a permanent green vertical line and my parents does show a thick blue line now and again but goes if we turn the TV off for a short while. Of course LCD's can have dead and/or stuck pixels so try find a manufacturer with a no dead pixel policy. Another thing is weight, if you want a big TV in your bedroom it's woth considering how you will get it up there. Plasma's weigh a ton but LCD's are lighter. And both need to be fixed properly to a wall if they are gonna be hung. Don't ever screw into drywall and expect that to hold. Fix into studs or brickwork. www.hdtvtest.co.uk is an excellent website run by television geniuses. Try it out.
One of the things I noticed in my search is that some of the old LCD and Plasma stereotypes are inaccurate. I was originally gravitating towards LCD because of their anti-glare matte finish. These days many LCD are now coming with a glass screen to increase the black levels which means no matte finish. My 32” Phillips LCD is as reflective as my 42” plasma that broke. I think Sony and Samsung are about the only two brands not using glass on their LCDs. Plasma technology has been moving forward and most high end plasmas now come with a glare filter which means they aren’t as bad as they used to be. New plasmas are also lighter, brighter, use less power, and can come in extra thin models. Burn in seems to be a non-issue these days. LCDs still have the edge when it comes to crisp color popping pictures which is probably why they sell so well. LCDs have higher input lag and response times but plasmas can have something called phosphorus trails which look like ghosting. Plasma are on the rise again because they now cost less than equivalent LCDs and supposedly have better 3D. A 3D plasma will cost about $400 less than 3D LCD and Panasonic now includes the 3D feature on all TVs they sell. I was shocked when I saw how thin plasma had gotten.
Panasonic purchased some of Pioneers technology and hired many of their engineers in 2008. In 2010 CNET named the Panasonic GT25 one of the best pictures ever tested. In fact the top 5 TVs are all Plasma which makes me wonder why LCD has been getting most of the sales. I guess LCDs just pop more on the sales floor. My BestBuy has a floor model GT25 for an amazing price with the 3D Avatar kit and 3D bluray player thrown in for free. I almost jumped on it but I figured it must already have a ton of hours on it. From what I have read the ST30 is pretty close in quality so I’ll stick with that. BB also had a Samsung 7000 on display and it looked amazing. It had to be the best looking TV I’ve ever seen.
The common perception of plasmas is that they have burn-in and should be avoided. I'm not saying that's correct. From what I understand, burn-in is a non-issue on newer models. That's just what most people believe.
Well I think a big difference between the two has been marketing. How many improvements have we seen marketed for LCDs over the years? 120Hz, 240Hz, LED backlit, LED edge lit, smart dimming, infinite dynamic contrast, quad color. I don't recall plasma's have much in the way of marketing these last few years which I think leads to the idea that they are old technology. Thats what I thought until I started doing the research.
It's really a minor issue now, but I agree that's probably something many believe. You'd probably need to leave a static image on for a week to do any damage on modern plasmas. Anti-image retention tech has improved considerably. I'd definitely recommend checking out Panasonic's plasmas to anyone looking for a new TV, especially if price is an issue. Great picture quality and very reasonable prices.
I have two friends with Samsung 50" plasmas and another has a Panasonic 50" plasma and I'm not a fan. The colours always look over saturated if you want contrast and I'm just not seeing the "blacker blacks" thing at all, more the opposite, greyer blacks. When I had a cheap 40" I thought my mates 50" plasma looked great, mainly because I hated the poor viewing angles and unnatural contrast of my LCD. Then I upgraded to a Sony Bravia 46" Z series and found it far superior to all plasma's I compared it to. I was playing GoW3 on my LCD for a few days then brought it over to my friends so he could play it for a few days. Good god it looked horrible in comparison! The contrast wasn't there at all and the colours were all just wrong. I did the same thing late last year with GT5; played it for a few weeks on my TV, took it to play on my friends Panasonic Plasma which is only 6 months old and the colours and contrast are horrible and unrealistic. I first thought that my first mates Samsung had just suffered some burn in and had lost it's good contrast from doing too many burn in recovery's since I knew he did a few (shifting pixels, white screen) because I thought it looked a lot better before I got used to my 46" LCD. But as I said, I had the same issues on my other friends Panasonic, and later on, with another friends different model Samsung. The one gripe I do have with my LCD is that is developed some backlite clouding particularly noticeable in 3 of the edges. It's only bad for dark scenes in movies mainly, and movies that are in 2.5:1 or something with black bars top and bottom mainly avoid it (the TV seems to completely black out those areas as opposed to the regular black in the movie). It is a let down though as in every other way I find my TV to be perfect! For this reason I think an LED backlit LCD does have a definite advantage. The price is still a little exorbitant (although much more reasonable lately) and I have no good reason to upgrade just yet, but I think in a year or two I may consider it. As for the "hand held video/soap opera effect", I have seen this when watching movies in 200Hz (PAL), so I never use it and instead use 100Hz for movies which looks perfect. For gaming I set the TV to game mode which I think just runs at 50/60Hz. The issue of screen glare is another big one. Putting a plasma in the wrong room/wrong side of the room really ruins the viewing experience, the same goes for glossy/glass covered LCD's. At the same time, my original matte finish LCD was pretty underwhelming colour wise. My current LCD however has a semi gloss finish, the screen reflects a bit, but not sharp reflections, they are still very blurred. This means that both the colour is excellent AND that any reflections aren't too noticeable since the outlines aren't defined. It's not perfect, I still shut my blinds when watching a movie or cinematic game in the day time (not too often I do that though) but for general TV viewing it doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as it would on a full gloss screen.
Is 2009 considered modern? My friends Samsung 50" I mentioned above got really bad burn in from him leaving an update for Resistance2 going all night. The connection was having problems and it just sat on the logo and saying updating or something of the sort with a beam of light going around the logo (so it wasn't completely static). The next day that logo was stuck there. It took several hours of burn-in recovery procedures to mostly remove it and it wasn't completely gone for almost a week after. I have no idea if the picture quality of the TV was effected by this, all I know is that the colours and contrast look like crap compared to my new (also 2009) LCD.
Plasma's picture quality is superior to LCD. I've had Panasonic plasmas for years, and nothing has burned in. Ever. I have typed for days in Word on my screen, and none of the static images have ever been retained. No problems with games, either, including lengthy pausing. It sounds like the plasmas you checked out weren't calibrated properly. The best plasma TVs tend to be rated as having the best picture quality.
I played with the settings to no end on my friends Samsung 50" and it never looked good enough to me. The default settings on my LCD (general use preset and gaming preset) look great. How do you explain the burn in example I described above? Before this he had many much smaller instances of burn in just from general use, these would generally take a few mins of burn-in recovery to mainly remove and an hour or TV watching or more to completely remove. In the instance above he expected the PS3 to dim the screen as it usually does but technically something was happening so it never dimmed.
I think for some people, the word "plasma" just sounds more technologically advanced, therefore it MUST be the superior technology.
My parents have neoPDP Panasonic Viera Plasma coupled with Sky+HD and it looks better than just about every other TV I have ever seen. The only thing that came close was a £2500 Samsung 3D LED TV that I saw recently in John Lewis.
I'll have to go to a shop and check out a high end plasma then (if I can find one that has them!) since the cheap ones haven't impressed me at all.
LED and Plasma sets basically represent trade-offs vs. each other, rather than one being a clear winner, regardless of how expensive they get. And those trade-offs seem to get narrower every year. LED's improve at blacks and color depth, while Plasma improves at overall definition and brightness. And you can't really go by what you see in stores...you have no idea what settings they're using. Most big screen TV's today typically won't meet Energy Star ratings if you use the mode that stores typically run them at.
My 2006 Panasonic never had a problem but I have read that some of the newer Plasma might have the problem again. However, I’ve never heard that it’s permanent. From what I’ve read it will go away in a few hours or by running the screen wipe. That concerns me a little but I’ve never seen it. Regardless, I make sure that I never leave a static image on either my Plasmas or LCD screens. The stuff cost too much to take a chance. Find a 2011 Samsung 7000 or 8000. I thought it was OMG good. The most annoying issue with my LCD right now is the light leakage on the sides. It’s a cheap azz TV though but I’ve even seen pictures of cloudy light leakage on the LED arrays.
I'm fairly sure new Plasmas don't suffer from Ghosting; it was one of the major selling points at the store when I bought my Panasonic last year. I've left the TV running with a static image on in the background a lot too..never seem to have a trouble.
At the moment I think the best plasma's edge out the best LCD screens but I do think LCD's are more reliable. There must be good reasons why most companies moved away from plasma tech. I do think LCD TV's are steadily improving with LED backlighting. It will also be interesting to see if OLED screens will hit the market at a good size and price.
My only experience with plasma was with the 55" Pioneer my stepfather had. It looked great for the time. But I played my 360 on it once for about 10 minutes, and the burn-in was so bad I thought I had ruined the TV.