Question: Plasma or LCD?

As you consider your options in building the best home theater system possible, you will undoubtedly arrive at one major question: Which is better, plasma or LCD? Depending on your environment and what your goals are, the answer varies with each different application. Or click here for a quick reference comparison chart.

In general the rule we follow is that for larger sizes installed in the home (40 inches or greater), plasma is the better option. Because of weight and resolution, LCD is used at smaller sizes. For business applications, such as commercial signage or as a PC monitor, we recommend LCD. This is mostly in consideration of the static images being displayed on the screen (icons on your desktop, surveillance camera video, etc). The following article details how we arrived at those conclusions, through hundreds of installations.

Plasma displays more realistic color
Especially when you're talking about skin and earth tones, plasma monitors don't "neonize", or exaggerate colors like LCD's will. From our experience, LCD's do produce a nice color "popping" that especially looks good with computer graphics like Powerpoint presentations and video games. Colors are bright and vivid. But the accuracy of color reproduction in video is almost universally accepted as the plasma's biggest strength. We tell our customers to go to a local electronics retailer and look at the best LCD with images of people displayed on it. Look at that, and then look at your own arm to see how well the skin tones are depicted. You'll agree that the colors are much more accurate on plasma. But don't just take our word for it. If you're comparing metrics from different TV's, look at the number of colors it can reproduce. Plasmas will always come out on top by this measurement. Another stat that supports the measure of "color realism" is the contrast ratio, which plasma exceeds LCD on.

Plasma renders motion shots much more smoothly
Where you tend to see this is in the background of moving shots. In a football game, the camera is following the runner and the background moves behind the athlete. As those tiny blades of green grass move along quickly behind the player on an LCD screen, you will frequently catch some "twinkling" action with your eye. Why is this? Because the refresh rate on LCD is usually in the order of 10-12 milliseconds (compared to 6ms for plasma). In static or slower-moving images, this is enough to fool the eye into believing the movement is realistic. But when an image moves very quickly, your eye can catch the "in-between" frames when certain parts of the image are out of sync. Next time you're looking at an LCD, take note of the twinkling blades of grass or the blurry crowd behind that football player. As soon as the camera motion stops, the crowd will refocus and every detail on those blades of grass will reappear. By the way, you'll hear this condition referred to as "artifacting" on LCD sets. Plasma monitors simply work faster at refreshing the image, and therefore fool your eye better.

Plasma supports a better viewing angle
LCD technology works on the principal of filtering a bright white backlight into different colors as viewed from the front panel. Because of the way that this works, it means that light is focused to go through several layers of horizontal and vertical filters before it emerges from the screen. If you're sitting and looking at the TV straight ahead, then you're seeing the full effect of the focused light. But as you walk over to the side of the television, you see the image with less and less clarity; especially dark colors, because they are filtered the most. Plasma emits light through the front viewing panel in a different way, so it looks almost like a picture hanging on the wall. You can walk around until you're almost looking directly at the side of the television and you'll still see the image on the screen! This is the reason why you'll see people with higher-mounted LCD televisions actually tilted at an angle. Trust me, it looks really bad to have that monitor mounted above your fireplace at an angle so that you can see it well. This isn't something that you have to do with plasma. Not to mention when you and everyone from your block are crammed into the living room watching the Superbowl. Do you want to be the guy in the corner, leaning to the side and struggling to see what's happening? Although new LCD's are getting better, plasma still takes the cake.

When you need brightness in larger sizes, Plasma is the way to go
Unfortunately, not too many companies (especially LCD manufacturers) publish stats about brightness. Brightness is measured in "foot candles" or it's metric equivalent "candles per square meter", with a higher number being better. Why is the brightness a critical factor in selecting the right TV? If you have a well-lit room with lots of ambient light, you need a display that doesn't reflect the light in the room. If you've been doing internet research, you've probably read opinions that LCD is better when there is more ambient light. Traditionally, this has been the perception because of the beveled plastic screens on the front of the LCD monitor. The non-flat surface will reflect less light from around the room. But there are trade-offs to this non-reflective surface like the dimmer, washed-out picture when you look at it from any kind of angle. So for larger screen sizes, in brightly lit rooms, you'll get degradation of the picture towards the edges on LCD screens. On larger models, most LCD's run about 800 to 1,000 candles per sq meter. Whereas the newer plasmas are measured at 1,300 cd/m2.

What is "Contrast Ratio" and why is Plasma better?

CNET does a great job explaining contrast ratio with some technical detail. Plasma #1, LED #2 & LCD is #3