Plasma or LCD Display?

What are the LCD advantages over plasma displays?, what are the plasma displays advantages over LCDs

Subject: Plasma or LCD Display?

Date: 05-Aug-2011 Source: QuimiNet Related Industries: Office Supplies, Home Supplies, Home , Automation and Control

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Display

Many ask which is better: a plasma display or an LCD (liquid crystal display). The differences between them are detailed below:

Plasma Display

A plasma display (or PDP – Plasma Display Panel) is the type of flat display that usually is used for large TV’s (those 37” or 940 mm or larger.) The display has many tiny cells, positioned between two glass panels, which contain a mixture of inert gases (neon and xenon.) The gas in the cells is electrically converted into plasma, which causes colored fluorescents to emit light.

Plasma displays are bright (1000 lx or more per module), have a wide range of colors and can be made in sizes quite large (up to 262 inches diagonal.) They have a very low black level luminance, creating a black that is more desirable for watching movies. This display is only about 6 cm thick and its total thickness (including electronics) is less than 10 cm. Plasmas use as much energy per square meter as CRT (cathode ray tube) or AMLCD (active matrix liquid crystal display) television sets.

The lifetime of the latest generation of plasma displays is estimated at about 60,000 hours (or 27 years at 6 hours of use per day) of real-time viewing. Specifically, this is the estimated average life span for the display, or the time until the picture has degraded to half its original brightness. The display can still be used after this point, but this is considered the end of functional life of the device.

The main advantage of plasma technology is that large displays can be produced using extremely thin materials. Since each pixel is lit individually, the image is very bright and has a wide viewing angle.

LCD Display

A liquid crystal display, or LCD, is a thick, flat display consisting of a number of color or monochrome pixels arranged in front of a light source or reflector. This type is often used in batteries and electronic devices because it uses very small amounts of electricity.

Each pixel of an LCD consists of a layer of molecules aligned between two transparent electrodes and two polarizing filters (the transmission axes) which are (in most cases) perpendicular to each other. Without liquid crystals between the polarizing filter, light that passes through the first filter would be blocked by the second (crossing) polarizer.

In color LCDs, each individual pixel is divided into three cells or subpixels, which are red, green and blue, respectively, by increasing the filters (e.g., pigment filters, dye filters and metal oxide filters.) Each subpixel can be controlled independently to yield thousands or millions of possible colors for each pixel. CRT monitors use the same structure of "subpixel" through the use of phosphorus, although the analog electron beam employed in CRTs do not give an exact number of dots.

Factors to consider when buying a LCD monitor

- Resolution: Horizontal and vertical size expressed in pixels (e.g. 1024x768). Unlike CRT monitors, LCD displays have support for native resolution for the best display effect.

- Dot Pitch: Distance between the centers of two adjacent pixels. The shorter the dot width, the less graininess will be in the image. The width of the point may be the same both vertically and horizontally, or different (which is less common).

- Size: Size of an LCD panel measured diagonally (more specifically known as the active viewing area).

- Response time: Minimum time required to change the color or brightness of a pixel. The response time is also divided into rise and fall time.

- Matrix type: Active or passive.

- Viewing angle: More specifically known as viewing direction.

- Color support: Number of types of colors supported. This is more commonly known as color gamut.

- Brightness: Amount of light emitted from the display, which is also called luminance.

- Contrast: Ratio of intensity between the brightest and the darkest.

- Appearance: Ratio of the width and height (e.g., 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10).

- Input ports: Examples include DVI, VGA, LVDS, or S - Video and HDMI.

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