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Millimeter2005 Flat Panel Roundup
Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Jeff Sauer
A comprehensive look at today’s LCD and plasma monitors.
Over the last couple of years, many industry experts have predicted that LCD would eventually dominate the flat panel sector, ultimately replacing plasma in all form factors and sizes. However, that has yet to happen, even as LCDs continue to encroach into plasma's territory of larger sizes. Indeed, both technologies have not only remained strong, but they have also become part of mainstream culture. And it's that popular culture that continues to drive technologies forward in consumer TVs and the pro AV monitors we focus on here.
Panasonic’s brand-new 65in. flat panel plasma monitor, TH-65PHD8UK (pictured), made its market debut this month.
LCD's perceived long-term advantage is primarily due to the huge economy-of-scale LCD has over plasma, plus the eventual ability for LCD makers to compete on both price and picture quality. The success of LCD TV products over the last couple of years has allowed LCD makers to invest in new manufacturing facilities and research and development.
Those improvements have yielded better image quality and response time. Today, LG, Samsung, Sharp, and Sony now boast response times much less than 20ms, even less than 10ms on some models.
Larger-sized LCD panels are also becoming more practicable and affordable to build, but not nearly as quickly as the industry might expect. The largest on our chart is Sharp's 65in. Aquos, although that is really marketed as a consumer TV rather than a pro AV display. It's included simply because the next largest is Samsung's Ethernet-enabled 46in Syncmaster. Of course, both LG and Samsung have announced larger consumer LCD TVs, but while their respective 55in. and 57in. sets are expected this year, both have been delayed, and neither is shipping. LG's 71in. and Samsung's 82in. LCD TVs are not expected this year.
Plasma ultimately still dominates the larger sizes, including a 42in. to 50in. category that is now well within the grasp of LCD makes. While LCD is now in its seventh generation, plasma has continued to improve as well. Panasonic, for example, is now producing eighth-generation plasma panels and is aggressively combating plasma's perceived Achilles heel, burn-in; and now rates panels at 60,000 hours of use, if used smartly, before any significantly visible burn-in. That, says Panasonic, is likely to be preferable to an LCD that loses nearly half its brightness after 30,000 hours.
That might leave the technology battle between LCD and plasma in full flurry. But in many ways the market is staying ahead of the fracas by gaining a much better appreciation for when one technology is clearly the better option. For example, LCD's higher resolution and lack of burn-in tends to do better with text-based signage or in conference rooms that typically show presentation slides and spreadsheets. Plasma is usually the better choice when the content will be predominantly motion video. Any way you view it, both technologies appear likely to be around for several years.
The Brightside DR37-P uses individually modulating LEDs.
Understanding the charts
As in past years, this Flat Panel Buyers Guide focuses on professional AV panels. However, the line between professional and consumer products is getting a lot harder to draw. Up until a couple of years ago, manufacturers regularly developed pro-oriented panels first, only later migrating the technology into consumer products. Today, the opposite is true, and it's a direct function of the sizes of the relative markets.
Today, it's the consumer TV models that are brought to market first. And, since many higher-end consumers now expect “professional” features like component input, many smaller manufacturers no longer make a distinction between professional and consumer products. Larger companies still maintain broadcast/professional divisions and do offer pro-specific panels, but pro AV versions often now emerge after the consumer version, if at all. For example, Sharp's large 65in. LCD panel is part of the company's consumer Aquos TV product line, and there are no announced plans to release a different commercial version. The component inputs use RCA connectors rather than BNC, but with DVI, HDMI, and a handsome industrial design, a specific “pro” panel may not be necessary.
Sharp is one of a few companies that now puts TV tuners in the pro AV-centric panels, and we've added that to our chart this year. Hitachi, Planar, and Viewsonic do the same because TV tuners are such a small cost item and even conference rooms may wish to tune into breaking news from time to time. Conversely, some consumer products actually don't include TV tuners because now-expected HD tuners are still somewhat expensive and most consumers already have cable or satellite boxes.
A number of manufacturers do not publish brightness and contrast specifications, and that's the unfortunate result of a lack of industry standards in measuring and reporting. It is also awkward to compare brightness and contrast numbers between LCDs and plasmas because the two technologies operate differently. Plasmas can typically have a brighter single white spot, but if the entire screen is white brightness decreases. On an LCD, the brightness would not change at a single spot if the entire rest of the screen went from black to white.
Plasma technology has a black level advantage over a technology that tries to literally block light to make black, but electronic black enhancement has given LCD good blacks as well. The tricky part, as with contrast measurements with any display technology, is achieving good blacks and white, while still preserving what's in between. Unfortunately, that's not something the charts show.
Panels up to 20 in.
LCD screens have been available in this smallest size category for more than a decade and a half, if you count the screen on notebook computers, and for a decade on digital video camcorders. Of course, even today, few of those notebook screens represent the very best that LCD technology has to offer due to cost considerations, and that generally begets LCD’s stereotypical lack of color depth and slow refresh times that lead to image ghosting.
However, as LCD technology has improved enough for premium panels to be used in more professional video products. Marshall is well known for its line of very small LCDs, often in rackmount configurations (we’ve listed only the single-monitor configurations due to chart size considerations) that can be mounted in production trucks or on studio walls. Sony’s LUMA series monitors, that ranges in size from 9" to 23", on the other hand, are designed as replacements for larger production CRT in either live production environments or non-linear editing studios. Panasonic’s Proline LCDs and JVC’s new line of production LCDs target the same audience.
A year ago all of the less-than-20in. products were 4:3, and it’s mostly the same again this year, even though almost all of the larger panels now 16:9. The reason is that most of these smaller monitors are going into existing production environments to replace 4:3 CRTs, although this year we see the early migration to small 16:9 screens. Both Marshall and Panasonic have a 16:9 7in. monitor and Sony has one sized 14in.
21in. to 35in. panels
This size category continues to be exclusively LCD, and that will probably continue for several more years. It is just not practical for plasma to go this small due to the cost of the electronics and difficulties miniaturizing the plasma cell grid to a high enough resolution, so any new non-LCD products of this size will probably come from future technologies, like OLED.
Unfortunately for plasma, this is the sweet spot size for the huge consumer flat panel TV market, and it's that success that is most helping drive LCD R&D forward, thus narrowing the quality gap between LCD and plasma. It has also brought prices down to the point that a few products in this category are now less than $1,000, including HP's f2304, ViewSonic's N2750w, and a 27in. Westinghouse TV that primarily targets the consumer market. Expect greater price erosion over the next year as manufacturers try to capture more of the consumer migration from CRTs to LCDs.
Akira's PK-8410 is compiled of a matrix of four 42in. panels.
37in. to 49in. panels
This size category continues to be the main battleground between LCD and plasma. 42in. remains a plasma sweet spot, but 40in. LCDs have become fairly commonplace, and there are a handful of 42in. to 46in. LCDs. Still, plasma maintains a significant price advantage and in many cases a quality advantage as well.
While it's awkward to look at specific MSRPs, due to inconsistent dealer discounts and distribution strategies between manufacturers, plasmas can be as little as half the price of similarly sized LCDs. That's a considerable discount, especially when paired with similar quality, and has allowed plasma to remain strong in the critical 40in. to 50in. category despite increasing pressure from LCD. The question is whether forced price erosion will eventually impact future plasma R&D efforts.
One of the more intriguing advancements in LCD is barely noticeable on this list; the 37in. LCD from Brightside Technologies. Rather than a conventional CCFL backlight, Brightside is using individually modulating LEDs for the backlight in order to achieve far superior color depth and accuracy to what a typical LCD can achieve. (NEC has a similar 21in. monitor not on our list due to lack of video inputs. Sony and Samsung have demonstrated LED-backlit LCDs in the last year.) As Brightside's initial pricing shows, this is a premium technology which, for the time being, serves an exclusive audience of colorists and color critical uses; however, it is also a technology that shows how LCD might compete more directly against one of plasma's main strengths.
50in. and larger
Despite a number of announcements from LCD manufacturers for larger-than-50in. over the last year, this category continues to be dominated by plasma. We have included Sharp's large 65in. Aquos TV, but other than that, all of the 50in.-plus panels are plasma. What's more, several are now prices at less than $10,000, including Samsung's 63in. plasma.
As with the announcements for large LCDs, manufacturers like Samsung and LG have demonstrated even larger products than are listed here, topped by Samsung's 102in. plasma. However, those products are not currently in mass production, nor have there been any announcements for pro AV version of the panels.
The largest panel in our chart is the 84in. PK-8410 from Akira. But, it's not actually an 84in. piece of glass. Instead, Akira has integrated technologies that allows four panels to work together to show one image spread out over the full 84in. The difference between this product and a similar one from NEC is that Akira features a single bezel around the entire set of panels which gives almost no perceptual break between the four glass pieces. So, from large to small, we'd have to say this year's class of flat panels looks picture perfect.
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