I have 3 tvs in my house I often find myself watching tv in the basement where my Plasma is just because the LCD looks terrible in the dark why is this so
In: Technology
I know this is going to get buried but I’m going to post it anyway.
When it comes to TVs, the picture that you see is made up of hundreds of thousands to multiple millions of dots called pixels. Their number and arrangement determine your TV’s resolution.
Each pixel is made up of a color source called a sub-pixel that is usually a red, a green, and a blue in order to display whatever color is needed. The type of TV tells you how those pixels are lit up (so you can see them) and what those light sources are made of but for this explanation that’s not super important, the important thing is whether those light sources are separate from the pixel or not. In short, separate light sources cannot be turned off because they need to light the picture and cause light bleeding which, in essence, ruins picture by making LEDs that shouldn’t be showing anything appear gray.
Plasma TV pixels are both the light source and color source. Because of this there’s minimal light bleed and the colors can show through as bright and clean as possible. The problem with plasma TVs is they are heavy, expensive to make, and expensive to run. They work by running electricity through gas which takes a lot of electricity and gives off a lot of heat.
LCD and LED TVs use a light source that is separate to the pixels. They use the same display technology but they differ in how they light up their pixels. Because they use a separate light source they also have significant light bleed which leads to a degradation of the picture. LCD TVs use tube light bulbs around the frame of the TV to light the pixels, which is kind of like trying to light up a room using a flashlight that’s behind the door frame. LED TVs started using LEDs instead of light bulbs around the frame which was better because they could get brighter but it didn’t lead to much improvement in picture quality. Then they moved the LEDs behind the pixels and this got better. They discovered that if they laid out the LEDs in a grid they could have better control over the amount of light and thus the quality of the picture. This grid is referred to as zones so the more zones a TV had, the more LEDs there were to light the pixels, and the better the picture. Better quality lights arranged in a better pattern led to less light bleed and overall better picture.
Then came OLED TVs. In OLED TVs essentially every sub-pixel is its own LED, meaning that it provides both the color and the light for a pixel in much the same way a plasma does. This also means that each individual pixel can be turned off when they aren’t displaying a color leading to a sharper and better looking picture.
So plasma and OLED TVs display picture in a similar way which is why they both have amazing picture quality. Plasma is an older, more inefficient technology that is expensive, uses a lot of power, and gives off a lot of heat. OLED is getting cheaper, uses a minimal amount of power, and does not generate heat.
There are many other reasons why OLED and plasma TV picture looks better but it all essentially comes down to the fact that each dot that makes up the picture lights itself up and can turn itself off.
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