Plasma TV is Dead - Pioneer Exits

[stratman]

Sony never announced it was getting out of LCD. Everyone is moving towards LCD. Sony left the microdisplay (SXRD/LCoS) market and I absolutely think that is headed for extinction as well.

When we say "plasma is dead" it simply means that the end of plasma is now tangibly inevitable. When companies who have been plasma-exclusive suddenly shift to be LCD-inclusive it tells us that there are things going on in the industry which say that LCD will get so cheap to manufacture soon and be so consumer-compelling (ie <1-inch panels, etc) that plasma is in trouble.

LED backlighting will remove one of the last hurdles - black levels from the plasma camp, while 120Hz (if they ever implement it correctly) can alleviate the blurring issue.

I agree somewhat, but there are still so many "ifs", I don't know how far along Panasonic is on the road to recover their initial investments in plasma technology, perhaps if they sunk more money than the competition they need to stay the course a bit longer to recoup. What's the limit to plasma development? Thinner? Better resolution? Has it reached it's potential? Can these goals be reached at a worthwhile economic level? Will switching to LCD cost Panasonic an arm and a leg, causing them to invest in a transitional technology (we do know LCD is transitional, eventually to be overtaken by another display technology)and thereby hampering the adoption of the next gen display? More than technology, the current world-wide economic picture will dictate what the next leap will entail, OLED,LASER or a hybrid of sorts. And you can add to the mix, the Korean CE industry who happens to be swimming in cash right now, they might take the lead from Japan and come to market first. These are interesting times indeed.

 

[quarlo]

Sensationalist BS, IMHO. There is nothing as in *NOTHING* that even comes close to a Kuro at the high end (50"+). Sad that Pioneer's somewhat greedy pricing policy kept them confined to a smaller segment of the market than they could have had based on quality. Like the man on the corner selling $50 apples - don't have to sell many, but not too many people buying, either. I am so very happy that I got my 60" this year. I've seen dozens of LCD, RP, projector and even other large form factor plasmas (many of those systems professionally calibrated) and absolutely nothing beats the Kuros for PQ *in my opinion*. As someone mentioned previously in the thread - inferior technology often wins in the marketplace for reasons having nothing to do with being the best.

 

[stratman]

I had my eye on the 50" KURO, but now I might go back to my original target, the new 50" Panny coming out this year.

 

[Pyrrho]

Let's see, comparing plasma with LCD, LCD uses less power, generates less heat, is lighter weight, is better for viewing in lighted rooms (which is how most people view), zero chance of "burn in"...how do you come to the conclusion that an "inferior" technology won?

Notice that "picture quality" and "black levels" didn't appear in your list

You evidently need to be told that something is a picture quality issue when it is a picture quality issue. Take another look at the fragment of my post that you quoted, and you will see in the list for LCD: "is better for viewing in lighted rooms". Evidently I need to spell this out for you. LCD tends to have less issues with glare. Glare is a picture quality issue. What did you think it meant?

One could also regard burn-in as a picture quality issue. Burn in an image, and see how you like the looks of it.

My comment to which you replied was a reaction to the claim that LCD was an inferior technology to plasma, not to a statement about picture quality. Consequently, issues other than picture quality are relevant to the issue, and is why non-picture quality issues were included.

You might also want to look at my post #14 above in this thread for comments about black level. I certainly do not say that LCD is the best in every way. But to call it "inferior technology" when, in fact, it is superior in many ways, is just plain wrong. Plasma, in some ways, is currently superior to LCD. Does it make you happy to see this? As I stated in post #14 above, every current TV technology has its share of virtues and vices. There simply is no such thing as a perfect TV, or one that is the best in every way.

Of course, all of these comments are regarding the best that is currently possible; any type can be bad if improperly made.

As for the future, as LCD continues to improve in the areas in which it is behind plasma, we might expect that, eventually, it may catch up or even surpass plasma. Or it might not. But there is no chance that plasma will catch up with all of the virtues of LCD, as, for example, in order for plasma to work, the gas in the screen needs to be heated, which means they will always give off more heat and use more power (just do a search for how plasma works). For related reasons, it is doubtful if it will ever be as light as LCD, though I suppose some new light-weight heat-resistant transparent material might be invented. Whatever the future may bring, of course, that does not tell you what is best to buy right now. But the future certainly looks better for LCD, and were I investing in manufacturing, I would not be investing in plasma. Evidently, Pioneer now agrees with me on this. But, for buying a TV today, plasma might be the right choice for a particular individual, depending on what one's needs are and which vices one can tolerate. If you are one of those for whom plasma is the best choice, then buy one and be happy. But do not imagine that your circumstances are the same as everyone else's circumstances, or that everyone would be better off making the same choice you have made.

 

[autoboy]

Long live rear projection!

I really want rear projection to stick around because it has such potential for cheap, big displays with outstanding picture quality. Why is thin so popular!

I want my Laser DLP with deep blacks, accurate colors, and a foot thickness in a 60", lightweight, and beautiful tabletop TV.

Or an OLED. But 5 years plus is a long time to wait. I usually only last 2 years before I get bored with what I have.

 

[chrisivan]

"Plasma TV is dead"

Whoa, Nelly. Dont bet on it.

When do they start having clearance sales on all those Kuro's.........I'm drooling and chomping at the bit

 

[Maxsunset]

I'm calling BS on this article. There are NO referenced listed whatsoever.

And as of now, I dont think I'll be coming back to Audioholics anytime soon. What's with the sensationalist headline? Even if the story were true, the headline is a complete exaggeration. So between the lack of decent articles on Audioholics, the terrible selection of products on their online store (I mean, really terrible selection (it feels like what they have is all they could manage to get)), and the countless reviews of dime-a-dozen recievers from Denon and Yamaha (variety is the spice of life guys) and other crap products that seem to be reviewed over and over again just because the Audioholics staff are fanboys of some particular brands, and not to mention all the stupid articles that have nothing to do with A/V whatsoever (Apple announcements, videogames...).... I'm done. If I want gaming news I'll go to a reputable gaming news outlet. If I want apple news, I'll go somewhere without the fan-bias. If I want to buy crap recievers, I'll buy one at a box store, which I dont do in the first place because I like good sound...

 

[jonnythan]

I'm calling BS on this article. There are NO referenced listed whatsoever.

And as of now, I dont think I'll be coming back to Audioholics anytime soon. What's with the sensationalist headline? Even if the story were true, the headline is a complete exaggeration. So between the lack of decent articles on Audioholics, the terrible selection of products on their online store (I mean, really terrible selection (it feels like what they have is all they could manage to get)), and the countless reviews of dime-a-dozen recievers from Denon and Yamaha (variety is the spice of life guys) and other crap products that seem to be reviewed over and over again just because the Audioholics staff are fanboys of some particular brands, and not to mention all the stupid articles that have nothing to do with A/V whatsoever (Apple announcements, videogames...).... I'm done. If I want gaming news I'll go to a reputable gaming news outlet. If I want apple news, I'll go somewhere without the fan-bias. If I want to buy crap recievers, I'll buy one at a box store, which I dont do in the first place because I like good sound...

I've learned not to take the "news articles" too seriously. Most of them are either jokes or gross exaggerations. They're more akin to wonky editorials than news posts.

 

[kaiser_soze]

To say plasma is dead because the 5th largest manufacturer pulls the plug on building their own panels is silly! ...

No one doubted the quality of Pioneer's Plasmas, the problem is its hard to sell a TV that costs twice as much as its competitors. ... PRICE

I am glad that someone here finally said what was begging to be said.

When I saw the email in my inbox, from Gene, and saw the subject line, i.e., plasma is dead, I could not help but open the mail. When I did, it was immediately apparent that I had been misled. The actual information was about Pioneer having made a strategic business decision to stop manufacturing their own plasma panels and to procure them from Panasonic instead. What sense does it make to infer from this information, that plasma is dead? It makes no sense at all. Plasma may be losing sales rapidly to LCD panels for all I know, but for it to make sense to infer the imminent demise of plasma, you would have to look at sales trends, and while the decision by Pioneer may have somthing to do with sales trends, their was no such information given in the article.

So it was a little annoying, and then when I decided to read the forum posts, all I saw for the first several pages were a lot of people who had taken what they were told at face value, without questioning the obvious problem with it, and then jumping into a debate which was wrought with a lot of misinformation.

Why did it take almost three full pages of posts before someone pointed this out? One person even stated, in effect, that you can't get an LCD panel larger than 48". What complete nonsense. At least one person made statements regarding the hysteresis of LCD, i.e., the motion blur or jerkiness. These problems are historically correct, but not any more. My new 52" Sony XBR has zero motion artifacts. There is no blur at all, and with the 120 Hz screen refresh rate, there are no motion artifacts.

As for black levels and contrast ratio, I don't doubt that it is marginally inferior to the best plasma panels that are available today, but during the daytime or at night when the room lighting is on, the black bands at the sides when watching 4:3 content appear every bit as black as the black frame that covers over the speakers on the sides. At night with the lights all turned off, you can tell that the black is not completely black, but it is hardly noticeable at all when looking at the picture. I have a critical eye when it comes to television, and I was fully aware that there is a detectable difference in the depth of the black levels, with the best of the plasma sets having a slight advantage. But all the information that I have says that efficiency and/or sensitivity of the plama cells diminishes over time, i.e., that the more an individual cell is used, the less light it produces for a given applied voltage or power. That is all I need to know, to know that screen burn-in of plasma is necessarily a real effect. Everything that I have read says that this effect is very real, and yet at least one person here claims that it is not real. If this effect is not real, why would the manufacturers make a fuss over that pixel-shifting stuff, which, by the way, would be the last thing that I could imagine wanting in a TV. If this effect is not real, why don't they give a five-year warranty against screen burn-in?

 

[kaiser_soze]

I honestly cannot stand LCD's, for the most part. The motion, even with "120hz" is literally unwatchable in my opinion. It completely distracts you from watching the movie.

It is misinformative for you to state that as though it is a universal property of all LCD panels. It probably was as recently as two or three years ago, but it certainly is not anymore.

Perhaps it has been a few years since you have visited an electronics store. Two or three years ago, the effect was time smear, which was due to the decay time or hysteresis being too slow. That was fixed, as evidenced by the fact that many of LCDs from a year or two back exhibited a jerky effect with motion. There is no way that the jerky effect could occur as long as the hysteresis was too great (slow). With the hysteresis problem being fixed, all that was needed to fix the jerky effect, which was effectively due to the over-correction of the hysteresis problem, was to double the frame refresh rate. If you do that by synthesizing a complete (progressive) frame in between each time-adjacent pair of complete frames in the signal, then there can hardly be any doubt that the net effect will be an improvement in the perceived smoothness of the motion.

It should also be noted that when reverse 3:2 pulldown is applied to extract 24 original frames per second for content that was originally shot at 24 frames per second, that the ratio of original frames to frames as presented on the screen is a nice integer ratio of 1:5, which tells you that in between each time-adjacent pair of original cinematic frames, you need to synthesize four frames. Were you to simply repeat each frame four times, the effect would be very similar to the jerky motion that you see in the theater. If you have observed jerky motion with an LCD panel TV that uses a screen refresh rate of 120 Hz, the most likely explanation is that you were watching film-based content where the LCD TV had applied reverse 3:2 pulldown to extract the original 24 frames per second, but then simply repeated each frame four times in succession. If so, what you saw was very much the same as you would have seen had you watched that film-based content in a theater.

 

[mk7se]

Even if the story were true, the headline is a complete exaggeration. So between the lack of decent articles on Audioholics, the terrible selection of products on their online store (I mean, really terrible selection (it feels like what they have is all they could manage to get)), and the countless reviews of dime-a-dozen recievers from Denon and Yamaha

I agree.

While I am and have been a big fan and have gleaned alot of info here. This article is hog-wash.
Plasma might not last for ever, but it's harldy dead.

I also thought I was the one who noticed their bias toward Denon and Yamaha.
But hey, write a raving review and cover every time a new Denon receiver or OVER-PRICED dvd player comes out (twice a year it seems), and you get free stuff to furnish your own HT.
Wonder what the headline would say if Denon made plasmas?

 

[kaiser_soze]

Its all about production, ... Pioneer did not have the capacity to compete ... That is why they pulled the plug.. Cheaper to buy than to produce yourself..

Much as this seems like stating the obvious, it was entirely appropriate to state it here, since this evidently did not occur to the vast majority of people here who interpreted the fact of Pioneer's decision to stop making the things themselves as proof positive of the demise of plasma technology.

 

[JackT]

Wonder what the headline would say if Denon made plasmas?

Ha ha, or Axiom.

 

[kaiser_soze]

Sony never announced it was getting out of LCD. Everyone is moving towards LCD. Sony left the microdisplay (SXRD/LCoS) market and I absolutely think that is headed for extinction as well.

Thanks for clarifying what Sony actually did do, since at least one person had something along the lines of Sony getting out of the LCD market. Even if that comment was based on Sony's deal with another manufacturer, it was not apparent to me, from what little I read about that, that it meant that Sony would stop manufacturing their own LCD panels. It does seem that SXRD/LCoS is now a dead-end, and I attribute that to two factors, one of which is that the quality of shine-the-light-through-it LCD is now good enough that LCoS no longer offers a significant advantage. The other factor is that people simply want flat panels, and that spells death for all "micro-display" technology, i.e., for DLP as well.

When we say "plasma is dead" it simply means that the end of plasma is now tangibly inevitable. When companies who have been plasma-exclusive suddenly shift to be LCD-inclusive it tells us that there are things going on in the industry which say that LCD will get so cheap to manufacture soon and be so consumer-compelling (ie <1-inch panels, etc) that plasma is in trouble.

Your conclusions simly do not logically follow from the given information. There may well be other information that, when all of it is taken together, would lead you to that conclusion. But if so, you should present all of that information and explain how you reached that conclusion, and not write as though you believe that it is logically sensible to deduce, from the fact that Pioneer has decided to stop manufacturing their own plasma sets and has decided to sell LCD panels alongside their branded plasmas, that plasma is dead. As far as what the objective information here tells you about "what is going on in the industry", the given information, in and of itself, tells you exactly what it tells you in and of itself, no more and no less. The immediate information deals only with Pioneer's business decisions, and that information, in and of itself, tells you nothing at all about the future cost trends for LCD.

LED backlighting will remove one of the last hurdles - black levels from the plasma camp, while 120Hz (if they ever implement it correctly) can alleviate the blurring issue.

I am not aware of any problem whatsoever with the implementation of the 120Hz refresh rate of my new Sony XBR. I have not been able to detect any problems whatsoever with it, and the motion that I observe, both for video-based content and film-based content, is as natural as any motion that I have ever observed on any TV. It goes without saying that it is better than the jerky motion that you see in a theater using a mechanical projector that operates at 24 frames per second.

 

[kaiser_soze]

I'm calling BS on this article. There are NO referenced listed whatsoever.

And as of now, I dont think I'll be coming back to Audioholics anytime soon. What's with the sensationalist headline? Even if the story were true, the headline is a complete exaggeration.

It did not occur to me that the story might have been fabricated. But the rest of what you said there is right on the mark. I received an email that turned out to be a completely sensationalist exaggeration, unquestionably written for the specific purpose of getting me to open and read the email.

So between the lack of decent articles on Audioholics, the terrible selection of products on their online store (I mean, really terrible selection (it feels like what they have is all they could manage to get)), and the countless reviews of dime-a-dozen recievers from Denon and Yamaha (variety is the spice of life guys) and other crap products that seem to be reviewed over and over again just because the Audioholics staff are fanboys of some particular brands, and not to mention all the stupid articles that have nothing to do with A/V whatsoever (Apple announcements, videogames...).... I'm done. If I want gaming news I'll go to a reputable gaming news outlet. If I want apple news, I'll go somewhere without the fan-bias. If I want to buy crap recievers, I'll buy one at a box store, which I dont do in the first place because I like good sound...

I don't know about the quality of the articles, etc., but today for the first time I took a look at the store, and this was the first time that I even was aware that Audioholics had a store. I didn't see any particularly good bargains.

I could not help but consider the possibility that the full explanation for the sensationalist, B.S. headline has something to do with the store...

 

[Audioholics]

I am not aware of any problem whatsoever with the implementation of the 120Hz refresh rate of my new Sony XBR. I have not been able to detect any problems whatsoever with it, and the motion that I observe, both for video-based content and film-based content, is as natural as any motion that I have ever observed on any TV. It goes without saying that it is better than the jerky motion that you see in a theater using a mechanical projector that operates at 24 frames per second.

Throw up a detailed test pattern on it like a 2-3 Moving Zone Plate.

I think some of you need to read my other article.

I have yet to hear one person actually address any of my points. Many just don't like what I wrote, how I wrote it, or my conclusions. If this were an encyclopedia I may feel the need to come up with more data, however I think I was thorough enough. The trouble is most people didn't read the whole article and got ticked off after the first paragraph (if they made it past the headline.)

It's not like this isn't big news for plasma.

In short...

lol

 

[JackT]

Sony never announced it was getting out of LCD.

FWIW, Pioneer hasn't announced it's getting out of plasma.

 

[croseiv]

This is a funny thread. Almost knee-jerkish...

 

[croseiv]

Pioneer plasmas are overpriced. Samsung and Panasonic sets can be had for lower prices and are essentially as good. I suspect Pioneer's sales are hurting due to higher prices.

 

[mk7se]

The trouble is most people didn't read the whole article and got ticked off after the first paragraph (if they made it past the headline.)

Maybe YOU didn't. Then you would know that Pioneer is simply out-sourcing manufacturing plasmas but still putting their name on them.

or those concerned, this doesn't mean that Pioneer will exit the plasma business. It simply means that they are, in the interim at least, looking to leave the plasma panel manufacturing business

Pioneers panels are more expensive, but to say they are over-priced is only relevant to your own personal finances.
It's just like high-end audio. Most people can't justify buying separates from people like Krell and Levison or heaven forbid, Denons' new separates. (i.e.). Like-wise the general populace going into Costo, Best Buy, etc.... see a glowing LCD tv and they want that. The average consumer is "under educated".