A plasma display panel ( PDP ) is a type of flat panel display common to large TV displays (80 cm or larger). Many tiny cells between just two panels of glass hold a mixture of noble gases. The gas in the cells is electrically turned into a plasma which emits ultraviolet light which then excites phosphors to emit visible light. Plasma displays should not be confused with LCDs, another lightweight flatscreen display using different technology.
General characteristics
Plasma displays are bright (1,000 lux or higher for the module), have a wide color gamut, and can be produced in fairly large sizes—up to 3.8 m (150 inches) diagonally. They have a very low-luminance "dark-room" black level compared to the lighter grey of the unilluminated parts of an LCD screen. The display panel itself is only about 6 cm (2.5 inches) thick, generally allowing the device's total thickness (including electronics) to be less than 10 cm (4 inches). Plasma displays use as much power per square meter as a CRT or an AMLCD television. Power consumption varies greatly with picture content, with bright scenes drawing significantly more power than darker ones - this is also true of CRTs. Typical power consumption is 400 watts for a 50-inch (127 cm) screen. 20 to 310 watts for a 50-inch (127 cm) display when set to cinema mode. Most screens are set to 'shop' mode by default, which draws at least twice the power (around 500-700 watts) of a 'home' setting of less extreme brightness. Panasonic has greatly reduced power consumption by using Neo-PDP screens in their 2009 series of Viera plasma HDTVs. Panasonic claims that PDPs will consume only half the power of their previous series of plasma sets to achieve the same overall brightness for a given display size. The lifetime of the latest generation of plasma displays is estimated at 100,000 hours of actual display time, or 27 years at 10 hours per day. This is the estimated time over which maximum picture brightness degrades to half the original value.
Plasma display screens are made from glass, which reflects more light than the material used to make an LCD screen. This causes glare from reflected objects in the viewing area. Companies such as Panasonic coat their newer plasma screens with an anti-glare filter material. Currently, plasma panels cannot be economically manufactured in screen sizes smaller than 32 inches. Although a few companies have been able to make plasma EDTVs this small, even fewer have made 32in plasma HDTVs. With the trend toward larger and larger displays, the 32in screen size is rapidly disappearing. Though considered bulky and thick compared to their LCD counterparts, some sets such as Panasonic's Z1 and Samsung's B860 series are as slim as one inch thick making them comparable to LCDs in this respect.
Competing display technologies include CRT, OLED, LCD, DLP, SED, LED, and FED.
Plasma display advantages and disadvantages
Advantages
- Slim profile
- Can be wall mounted
- Lighter and less bulky than rear-projection televisions
- Achieves better and more accurate color reproduction than LCDs (68 billion/2 36 versus 16.7 million/2 24 )
- Produces deep, true blacks allowing for superior contrast ratios (up to 1:2,000,000)
- Far wider viewing angles than those of LCD (up to 178°); images do not suffer from degradation at high angles unlike LCDs
- Virtually no motion blur, thanks in large part to very high refresh rates and a faster response time, contributing to superior performance when displaying content with significant amounts of rapid motion
Disadvantages
- Earlier models are susceptible to screen burn-in and image retention (however, newer models have green phosphors and built-in technologies to eliminate this, such as pixel shifting)
- Phosphors in older models lose luminosity over time, resulting in gradual decline of absolute image brightness (newer models are less susceptible to this, having lifespans exceeding 60,000 hours, far longer than older CRT technology)
- Susceptible to "large area flicker"
- Generally do not come in smaller sizes than 32 inches
- Susceptible to reflection glare in bright rooms
- Heavier than LCD due to the requirement of a glass screen to hold the gases
- Use more electricity, on average, than an LCD TV
- Do not work as well at high altitudes due to pressure differential between the gases inside the screen and the air pressure at altitude. It may cause a buzzing noise. Manufacturers rate their screens to indicate the altitude parameters.
- For those who wish to listen to AM radio, or are Amateur Radio operators (Hams) or Shortwave Listeners (SWL) , the Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) from these devices can be irritating or disabling.
Native plasma television resolutions
Further information: Native resolutionFixed-pixel displays such as plasma TVs scale the video image of each incoming signal to the native resolution of the display panel. The most common native resolutions for plasma display panels are 853×480 (EDTV), 1,366×768 or 1,920×1,080 (HDTV). As a result picture quality varies depending on the performance of the video processor and the upscaling and downscaling algorithms used by each display manufacturer.
Enhanced-definition plasma television
Early plasma televisions were enhanced-definition (ED) with a native resolution of 840×480 (discontinued) or 853×480, and down-scaled their incoming high definition signals to match their native display resolution.
Resolutions
- 840×480
- 853×480
High-definition plasma television
Early high-definition (HD) plasma displays had a resolution of 1024x1024 and were Alternate Lighting of Surfaces (ALiS) panels made by Fujitsu/Hitachi. These were interlaced displays, with non-square pixels.
Modern HDTV plasma televisions usually have a resolution of 1,024×768 found on many 42 in plasma screens, 1,280×768, 1,366×768 found on 50 in, 60 in, and 65 in plasma screens or 1,920×1,080 found in plasma screen sizes from 42 in to 103 in. These displays are usually progressive displays, with square pixels, and will up-scale their incoming standard-definition signals to match their native display resolution.
Resolutions
- 1,024×1,024
- 1,024×768
- 1,280×768
- 1,366×768
- 1,280×1080
- 1,920×1,080
How plasma displays work
See also: Plasma (physics)The xenon, neon, and helium gas in a plasma television is contained in hundreds of thousands of tiny cells positioned between two plates of glass. Long electrodes are also put together between the glass plates, in front of and behind the cells. The address electrodes sit behind the cells, along the rear glass plate. The transparent display electrodes, which are surrounded by an insulating dielectric material and covered by a magnesium oxide protective layer, are mounted in front of the cell, along the front glass plate. Control circuitry charges the electrodes that cross paths at a cell, creating a voltage difference between front and back and causing the gas to ionize and form a plasma. As the gas ions rush to the electrodes and collide, photons are emitted.
In a monochrome plasma panel, the ionizing state can be maintained by applying a low-level voltage between all the horizontal and vertical electrodes–even after the ionizing voltage is removed. To erase a cell all voltage is removed from a pair of electrodes. This type of panel has inherent memory and does not use phosphors. A small amount of nitrogen is added to the neon to increase hysteresis.
In color panels, the back of each cell is coated with a phosphor. The ultraviolet photons emitted by the plasma excite these phosphors to give off colored light. The operation of each cell is thus comparable to that of a fluorescent lamp.
Every pixel is made up of three separate subpixel cells, each with different colored phosphors. One subpixel has a red light phosphor, one subpixel has a green light phosphor and one subpixel has a blue light phosphor. These colors blend together to create the overall color of the pixel, the same as a triad of a shadow mask CRT or color LCD. Plasma panels use pulse-width modulation to control brightness: by varying the pulses of current flowing through the different cells thousands of times per second, the control system can increase or decrease the intensity of each subpixel color to create billions of different combinations of red, green and blue. In this way, the control system can produce most of the visible colors. Plasma displays use the same phosphors as CRTs, which accounts for the extremely accurate color reproduction when viewing television or computer video images (which use an RGB color system designed for CRT display technology).
Contrast ratio
Contrast ratio is the difference between the brightest and darkest parts of an image, measured in discrete steps, at any given moment. Generally, the higher the contrast ratio, the more realisti
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