Speaking as someone who actually sells TV screens (albeit in Australia), I'd have to say if you're looking at large screens, plasma is the way to go. Quite simply, the reliability problems are nothing like what everyone claims, not that it'll stop people spouting off how much they "know" about how screens die in two weeks.
Firstly, plasma TVs don't have a life span they get to the end of, then suddenly explode. It's just that they naturally very gradually dim over their life span, and I do mean gradually. Many new models cite a half-life of 60000 hours, which works out to somewhere in the vicinity of 20 years at 8 hours a day, and that's just the half-life, the screen will still be working fine, it's just not as bright as it once was. In any case, seriously, you'd be replacing the TV anyway with something twice as good for half the price before then anyway as new technology comes out. Similarly, burn-in isn't a serious issue, I've never in all my time seen a screen with it as the result of a channel logo, and at my work we run huge arrays of plasma TVs on the same channel for months at a time. Sure, don't use a plasma TV as a fixed display (I've seen a cafe using one to display a menu, showing a totally static image, that's just stupid), but it's fine for home.
LCD "should" be better, by all technical standards. It does naturally have the potential for better colour, since a good LCD can display 24 bit colour, while a plasma tends to have 3-bit colour with temporal dithering. This means they can give a crisper, more stable image, with better colour detail. Similarly the response time problem is nowhere near what it once was, while it's still relevant, it's not terribly noticable. However, the problem is that the current crop of LCDs I've seen are all garbage, simple as that. They should be good, they just aren't, the pictures look like rubbish, with artifacting all over the place, making the picture look like the MPEG signal is severely short on bitrate, while the plasmas all look fine. However, I definitely expect this problem to go away as LCD matures a bit more, plasma has simply been doing TV a bit longer.
Really, the simplest way to put it is see the TVs in use, and decide what you like more. Reliability is not that huge an issue, just get what looks better to you, I just personally think that's plasma now. You're buying what you're seeing, so just get what you think looks better to you, since that's what matters.
PS. Don't get rear projection, regardless of the type, it's crap. It'll look great in a store, and if you're an AV nut you can get away with it because you'll have a dedicated room with the appropriate setup, but even today I simply find that they still look nowhere near the quality of LCD/Plasma, and when you get them home, they'll look nowhere near as good should you get any sunlight on the screen. |
