If you are looking at getting a new TV, or building a home theater, then there is quite a bit of research to be done before you make the plunge. Right now, as many of you may know, there are two competing technologies for High Definition Flat Screen TV. The first is LCD, or Liquid Crystal Display and the other is Plasma TV. You may be asking yourself which technology is better? What are their prospective pros and cons?
Well, before I get into what you should buy, you should get the “how does it work run down”, the quick and dirty edition. It is quite difficult to compare two competing technologies because they tend to be, by nature, apples and oranges. This is why it helps to know your fruit. Plasma and LCD TV’s generate their pictures in different ways.
For instance, a plasma display is comprised of two parallel sheets of glass, which enclose a gas mixture usually composed of neon and xenon that is contained in millions of tiny cells sandwiched in between the glass. Electricity, sent through an array of electrodes that are in close proximity to the cells, excites the gas, resulting in a discharge of ultraviolet light. The light then strikes a phosphor coating on the inside of the glass, which causes the emission of red, blue or green visible light. Based on the information in a video signal i.e. DVD movie, TV signal or a video game, the television lights up thousands of tiny dots called pixels with a high-energy beam of electrons. In most systems, there are three pixel colors—red, green and blue—which are evenly distributed on the screen Each, pixel by the way, consists of one red, one blue and one green sub-pixel. The three colors in each pixel combine according to the amount of electric pulses fed to each sub-pixel, to create visible images.
LCD TV’s, on the other hand, use a different technology. Basically, LCD panels are made of two layers of transparent material, which are polarized and are glued together. One of