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At one point in time, in the early-to-late-2000s, you would only have a couple of great options when upgrading to a new HD TV and away from traditional CRT and projection screens. The two primary flat panel types were LCD and plasma, and, back then, large-screen LCD panels were much more expensive, before the technology became widely accessible.
Plasma panel TVs used gas pockets, as the name suggests, which would release light when charged with electricity, giving them the bright, vibrant picture on the display. Unlike LCDs, plasma TVs utilized phosphor cells in red, green, and blue colors, which would be combined to create the final pixel or frame. Because of how they worked, they required high amounts of power compared to other technologies, and also produced excessive heat. In fact, a large majority of plasma TV failures, which resulted in repairs, came from overheating.
The benefit is that the self-emissive technology meant they didn’t need a backlight, and worked great in low-light and indoor conditions — but not bright environments unlike today’s LED-LCD panels — and compared to older LCDs, they produced a sharp, vivid picture especially at larger sizes. But when LED backlighting for LCD panels was introduced, and later OLED became popular, it was a death knell for plasma TV technology. Suddenly LCDs were brighter, cheaper, easier to manufacture, more lightweight, and delivered a picture that was just as high-quality. Also happening, 4K TVs were becoming more popular as an upgrade over HD, and creating a 4K-capable plasma TV would be inordinately expensive compared to LCD or LED formats.
Why did plasma technology become popular in the first place?
When plasmas became popular, it was largely because of the advantages the technology offered compared to CRT and projection TVs, which were always pretty bulky. Moreover, while CRT or cathode ray tube televisions are known to give off small amounts of radiation, plasma TVs do not, despite containing rare forms of gas inside. Neither do LCD TVs.
The biggest advantage of early plasma panels was how extremely thin they could be. They were also very bright, and since each pixel was illuminated individually, they offered incredible viewing angles, making them perfect for a large living room or big theater-size TVs. They also had extremely high refresh rates, up to 600Hz in some cases, although that number was partially marketing speak, and doesn’t impress quite as much compared to LCD and LED TVs today — many of which provide rates from 60Hz up to 240Hz.
But even so, they were expensive, and as more people learned how much power they consumed that also became a major contention point. Competing technologies got better pretty fast too, while also remaining affordable, and that has only gotten better year after year. It makes sense that manufacturers eventually moved away from developing and deploying the technology. Besides, modern OLED panels look incredible, which is one, of many, solid reasons why manufacturers have swapped primary panel technologies.
