Plasma TVs Give Life to Images
Plasma monitor televisions, which feature spectacular picture quality and are so thin you can hang them on a wall like a piece of art, are appropriately named. They will bleed your wallet.
The prices for plasma display panel, or PDP, TVs range from about $7,500 for a 42-inch model to about $15,000 for a 50-inch model equipped for high-definition digital television. PDP TVs are offered by Sony, Hitachi, NEC, Panasonic, Sharp and others.
The non-plasma alternatives are much cheaper. A bulky rear-projection TV with a 46-inch screen is available for as little as $1,000. And a regular, old-fashioned tube TV can be had for about $250 for a quite respectable 27-inch model.
So the closest the vast majority of us will get to one of the slick plasma TVs is an electronics showroom. But don’t stay too long--the richly colored, almost lifelike picture of a plasma screen is so achingly beautiful it will ruin your taste for even the better-quality conventional TVs. Looking at a PDP is more akin to looking out a clean window pane than at a picture tube.
PDP technology consists of two glass panels that hold, like a sandwich, electrodes and two gases--neon and xenon. When the gases are electrically charged they change to a plasma state, causing ultraviolet light to be produced. This light makes the red, green and blue phosphors packed into each pixel of the screen glow at varying degrees, producing the picture. All this packed into a screen that is only about 4 inches thick.
As opposed to the pixels lighting all at once to create a picture, conventional TVs create an image by scanning it across a screen. Also, traditional TVs require backlighting and light polarization, resulting in an image that is not as sharp or bright.
Like most electronic marvels, PDP TVs probably will become less expensive. But not any time soon.
“The consensus is that PDPs will start rolling out in good numbers in 2003. That’s when the prices might start to drop,” said Sam Matsuno of DisplaySearch, which does market research on the flat-panel monitor industry.
Just how many PDP TVs are in use is not known, he said. No independent studies have been conducted, and manufacturer estimates for the industry have ranged from 25,000 to 100,000 sets. Even the top end of those estimates has to get a lot higher before retail prices go down.
“Right now most of the companies making PDP TVs are probably losing money on them, even with the high prices,” Matsuno said. “They have to get to the point where the market size is big enough to absorb their investment in the technology. It’s a ‘Catch-22’ situation.”
It is possible to make smaller PDP TVs than what’s available in the United States at a lesser cost. A 32-inch model sold in Japan costs about $4,500. But domestic TV watchers who buy premium sets have shown a preference for really big TVs.
“A 32-inch model is probably not big enough to attract the North American consumer,” Matsuno said. “The largest PDP possible to make, at least now, is 62 inches. Rear-projection TVs can be made larger than that and are a lot less expensive.”
For example, a 70-inch rear-projection TV can be bought for $2,500--one-third the price of even the smallest PDP TV available in the U.S.
A less expensive alternative to PDP TVs will debut later this year, although it’s still hardly bargain basement. Thomson Multimedia plans to introduce, late next month under its RCA label, a liquid crystal on silicon, or LCOS, TV that has a viewing area of 50 inches and is equipped for HDTV. The company says it will rival PDP TVs in quality. The suggested retail price for the first LCOS TV--$6,999.
The LCOS is, technically, a projection TV despite its much more manageable depth. It works by emitting a white light from an ultrahigh pressure lamp that goes through a complex set of prisms to divide the light into red, green and blue components. These beams are combined back into a single video projection and then magnified for projection onto a flat screen.
Thomson spokesman Dave Arland said the price of LCOS TVs also will fall eventually. “Right now the technology is so expensive that we are only offering it in this one model,” he said. “We think we can expand the number of screen sizes offered and move the cost down.”
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Times staff writer David Colker covers personal technology.
