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’m still using my plasma. I have no intention of going LCD but will look at OLED when it dies. Never been a fan of LCD
Plasma TVs can control individual pixels independently. That means that black is shown as true black, since the pixel is fully turned off.
LCD TVs can’t control individual pixels, only groups of pixels, called zones. The more zones an LCD TV has, the better the picture will look but blooming will always be a problem around black areas in the image.
OLED TVs are the “new” Plasma TVs, since they also control individual pixels independently. If you want a new TV that has perfect blacks like your old Plasma TV, go for an OLED.
Edit: Guys, this is ELI5. To everyone trying to correct me talking about backlighting and all, yes, this is an oversimplification but it gets the point across.
Plasma is 20 year past its prime nowadays. There are no modern plasma TVs manufactured or sold.
If your LCD is from the same period, then this might be due to plasma technology being more mature at that time and yielding a better image as a result.
Modern TVs are variations on LCD technology. They will blow away any old plasma TV in terms of color, brightness, clarity
The big drawback of LCD and LED is that they have to use a backlight to provide an image and color, which means that grays and black usually look washed out because the light has to be on. Basically they have terrible contrast. They also tend to have worse color accuracy and lower coverage of the color gamut.
The upside is LED’s are really cheap, and things like local dimming have improved contrast a lot. LED has come a long way but OLED and miniLED is the future.
Drawback of plasma is price, image retention, poor brightness, amd plasma degradation.
Plasma never looked good IMO. All they had were the deeper black tones, everything else looked mushy. So glad I skipped that tech and waited for LCD.
There are a great number of factors in how good a tv looks not just plasma or lcd. You can have lcd TVs on the amazing end and the shit end. There are 3 different panel types for lcd being VA, ips, and TN each one will have its strengths and weakness in everything from color and brightness to viewing angles. But the overall specs can be make a wide difference in how it looks
Are you comparing a high end TV to something mid-range? Most plasma sets were high end models. Televisions at the same price point have improved in quality, but older sets that cost more can still win out.
Also, have you calibrated either television? It’s possible that the factory settings for the plasma are more to your liking than the LCD. This is both a subjective and objective issue. Not only do most TVs come with default settings that are not very accurate to what they “should” display, an objective failing of the device, but not everyone actually thinks a properly calibrated picture looks better. Extra bright colors, even if that’s not true to the source image, make for a subjectively better viewing experience to many people. It’s possible you could adjust settings and improve your experience with your LCD.
These extra bright color settings usually come at a cost of worse black level performance, and this is especially bad for LCDs.
If you’ve got an expensive TV, it’s probably worth having a professional calibrate the set. If you’ve got a cheap TV, then the default settings are probably terrible, and you’ll definitely see a benefit from fiddling with the settings yourself.
There are a lot of close/reasonable answers below. It’s about the backlighting.
You have two panels on LCD/LEDs…one with the color, and one that lights it up from behind. In cheap LCD/LEDs, the whole panel lights up. If your panel was showing a night sky in a horror movie, you’re going to have the color from one panel, and see that color because of the backlighting…EVEN IF THAT COLOR IS BLACK. This is where you get the lighting washed out. The only reason you’re seeing color is because of the lighting behind the panel.
They then created “zones”. Your back lighting will create a gradient where it turns off in areas where the entire screen is black, but you’ll get brighter areas where there are colors, creating vertical lines in dark scenes. It’s ugly.
They then made these zones smaller and smaller. The most reasonable ones are “array-based” lighting because it increases brightness in smaller, targeted areas, decreasing how washed out dark areas appear.
The reason OLED (like plasma) looked so good is because the color being displayed is also the light. So the if the area is supposed to be dark, there is no light being emitted. If it’s supposed to be green, a green pixel appears. If it’s orange, same thing. Therefore, your picture looks substantially better because it’s not washed out and therefore more brilliant to the human eye.
Plasma was tough because in order to get it brilliant, you risked “burn in” with the panel. Playing a video game for too long, or watching a particular channel with a chyron at the bottom could make that area of the screen permanently disfigure. OLED CAN have the same burn-in, but they are new enough to intelligently encourage you to shut the TV down before doing damage, or introduce a screen saver that flexes the pixels to avoid them getting burnt in.
I’ve been disappointed in my TV purchases because of not understanding the array-based backlighting and how important it is. I have a dozen LED/LCDs in the house that aren’t very impressive, of varying models, sizes, generations, and pricing. My OLED operates at a completely different level.
I have a high end OLED display but I still wish my old plasma hadn’t died. I just can’t stand any scene with side-to-side panning. It looks so weird and jarring.
Any ideas what I’m talking about and if there’s anything I can do?
Plasma TV’s looked good, the reason they went out of fashion is they burn in and get residual image shadows very easily. OLED is much newer than LCD and is better because each individual pixel can control it’s own color and brightness independently so they look great but they’re expensive
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