You can see intense colors and deep blacks. Dark scenes in movies or series have no secrets, because you can even see details in the shadow. Thanks to the endless contrast of the OLED panel, you can enjoy an image with a lot of depth and bright, lifelike colors. The buildup of movements is fluent and natural.
All these features combined ensure a realistic viewing experience if you have an OLED television. Plasma televisions don't get made anymore. This is partly due to the success of the LED TV, but it's also because the plasma technique has its limitations.
For example, you can't make a plasma screen with 4K resolution without compromising on the light output. In addition, plasma televisions aren't very thin.
They often have a thick bezel around the screen and a bulky backside. That means you'll spend dozens of euros more on energy costs each year. The OLED technique for televisions is still relatively new. The latest generation of screens all have a 4K resolution. In addition, they're very suitable for watching movies and series in HDR. With an OLED, you're ready for the future of television.
The bezels around the screen and the casing are often just a few millimeters thick. Business Stores Customer Service. Home All TVs. Essentially, plasma TVs don't require a backlight, and each pixel is self-emissive as it produces its own light. These are long tubes that are placed horizontally across the screen behind the LCD panel. When the light is turned on, it applies a voltage to the pixels, which makes them rotate a certain way to allow light through and produce an image.
When it wants to display black, the pixels are rotated to create an opaque screen so that light doesn't get through. This is what makes them different from plasma TVs because each pixel isn't self-emitting.
It's also important to note LED is simply a marketing term used by manufacturers to describe their backlight. Learn about differences between full-array and edge-lit local dimming. Plasma and LED TVs each present their own advantages and disadvantages in terms of picture quality, price, build, and availability. It's generally thought that plasma produces a better picture quality due to their superior contrast ratio, but LED TVs became more popular because of other factors, like a lower cost and greater availability.
Below you can see the differences in picture quality between two older TVs from It's clear the plasma was better at the time, but LED TVs have also gotten better since then, so picture quality has greatly improved. Contrast ratio was one of the main advantages and selling points of plasma TVs. Since each pixel emitted its own light, it simply turned itself off when it wanted to display a black image.
This allowed the TV to display very deep blacks, but because there was always a bit of charge left in the plasma, it still wasn't a perfect black level.
However, technology has evolved to greatly improved the contrast of LED TVs, even to the point where it's also as good as what plasma once was. Still, you won't get a perfect black level, but most modern LED TVs produce such deep blacks that even in a dark environment it looks like perfect black levels.
For reference, plasma TVs had a max contrast of about 4,, according to DisplayMate. Learn more about contrast ratio. LED TVs are a clear winner here, and it's one of the reasons why they surpassed plasmas in terms of popularity. LED TVs get significantly brighter, so they can fight glare from light sources easier. Additionally, plasma TVs had to use glass on their front panel, which caused intense glare if you had any lamps or windows around the TV.
LED TVs can use a coating on their glass panel to help reflect and diffuse light, making it a better choice for well-lit rooms. Plasmas were designed for dark-room viewing, but since most people don't have dedicated home theater setups and often watch with a few light sources around, they weren't that useful.
As you can see below, the plasma TV had pronounced reflections, to the point where it's even hard to see the image, and instead you're watching yourself watch TV. Learn more about peak brightness and reflection handling. This means that the image remained accurate when viewing from the side, which was great for watching sports or a show with a few people.
TV manufacturers have tried different technologies to improve viewing angles on VA panels. Samsung has an 'Ultra Viewing Angle' layer, and Sony uses their 'X-Wide Angle' technology to increase the viewing angles, both at the cost of a lower contrast ratio.
It's still not as good as plasma, but they're wide enough for watching TV in a fairly large seating area. Below you can see the differences in viewing angles between a plasma and a VA panel.
These TVs were tested on different test benches , so you shouldn't directly compare the videos, but we included them to give you an idea of how each technology affects the viewing angle. Learn about viewing angle here. Plasma TVs were great for motion handling, like with sports and video games due to their quick response time. Since each pixel had to retain a certain charge at any given moment, it was ready to display an image almost instantly.
This meant fast-moving scenes looked crisp and smooth, with no motion blur behind them. However, for LED TVs, it can be a toss-up; some lower-end models have a slow response time that causes motion blur, while other high-end TVs have a really fast response time.
Some LED TVs also use Pulse Width Modulation to dim their backlight, and this causes the backlight to flicker, which may create image duplication in fast-moving scenes. This can be particularly annoying, especially if you're watching sports with fast-moving content.
However, the refresh rate depends on the content, and since most content doesn't go past frames per second, having a higher refresh rate TV isn't very useful. Learn more about motion handling. Screen uniformity is another area where plasma TVs win. Since they didn't have a backlight, they could evenly control each pixel. LED TVs can suffer from uniformity issues, like darker edges or Dirty Screen Effect in the center, because the backlight output may not be even across the panel.
However, this is only really noticeable when watching content with large areas of uniform color, like a hockey or basketball broadcast, or if you're going to use the TV as a PC monitor. It shouldn't be noticeable with other types of content, and since uniformity can vary between units, you shouldn't worry about it too much.
Learn about gray uniformity here. One of the reasons plasma TVs didn't last too long at the top of the TV world is because of their risk of temporary image retention and permanent burn-in. Panasonic's recent plasmas, on the other hand, are generally better than the current TV offerings OLED aside available today. Especially the versions, the last and best of their kind and, let's not forget, the ones most likely to be lightly used.
You might get lucky and find one that, for some unfathomable reason, the current owner doesn't want any more. If you trust the seller and it's a good enough deal see below , it might be worth the risk.
Given what I've said about needing to see the TV before, it would seem that floor models would be a good option. No, they're not. I wrote a whole article specifically about why buying any floor model TV is a bad idea. The tl;dr version? Stores abuse the crap out of their TVs. Leaving them on all the time with who knows what going on. It's like buying a rental car, another thing I never understood. Sure the retiring car is cheap, but how do YOU drive rental cars?
You're not the only one. Floor model TVs are likely similarly abused. Here's my main caveat to everything else: If it's cheap. If the TV is significantly cheaper than a new Samsung , and it's in good condition, then maybe. How much cheaper? Well that's up to you. Personally, a few hundred off wouldn't cover the risk for me.
But that's me, and I haven't owned a TV in over a decade. The fact is, the most recent Panasonics do look better than most other TVs, and I can certainly understand someone's desire to have the best picture quality, and not succumb to LCD.
I'd say the most important thing, when even considering buying a used plasma, is being able to see it. Does it have any image retention or burn in, is it dim, or have any weird discolorations or dead pixels?
0コメント