The One About Plasma Televisions

And they were real chonkers, bulky, they were heavy. They contained capacitors that remained dangerous even after you turned the television off. By the way, that's one reason to not smash an old TV. If they're still charge stored in the capacitors, you could get a real jolt, like a deadly one. Televisions at that time had a four to three aspect ratio in those days. That means for every three units of height, you had four units of width.

That's why if you watch any old television programming today on a modern TV, and if that programming hasn't been adjusted to fit a modern television, there is always space on either side of the screen. Resolution was, you know, not great. If you wanted a really nice home entertainment system. You often leaned heavily on the other components to help pick up some of the slack you might have, like a projection television, maybe a rear projection television. But yeah,

these things were huge. But that would really change in nineteen ninety seven or so with the introduction of flat screen televisions, led by a technology that took a different approach to creating images. So with a CRT, you're using a zapper, an electron gun, and it fires a stream of electrons at the backside of a screen, and that backside of the screen is coded in phosphor dots. And when the elect trunds hit the phosphors, it excites the phosphors and they end up glowing as they let out

this excess energy. They luminess. But this new technology was using a different method to generate that light. It was using an excitable gas that could then be precision controlled by tiny electrodes. So this was the introduction of the plasma television. Now these days, plasma televisions are kind of like antiques or collector's items. No one is making them anymore. In fact, the last major companies to make plasma televisions stopped doing it in twenty fourteen, so it's been a

decade since these were consumer items. I mean, you could still find them occasionally, but no one's making them for a while. However, plasma television was in the running for like the best television technology on the market. So I thought we could talk about where this idea came from

and then what happened to plasma TVs. So we gotta start a ways back, like sixty years ago, in nineteen sixty four, and y'all, I'm going to just give highlights, but if you want a real breakdown on the development of the plasma display and the various technological challenges that needed to be solved to make it a possibility, I highly recommend you search for a white paper, an article rather,

and it's titled History of the Plasma Display Panel. It's by Larry F. Weber Weber of I Triple E, or as I used to say AE, and this article was published in a journal called Transactions on Plasma Science. This was back in two thousand and six. So knowing that it was back in two thousand and six when this was written, you need to forgive opening passages that say things like quote, plasma displays are enjoying an unprecedented degree of success as large screen televisions. End quote. Because that

was true in two thousand and six. These days not so much. But despite the fact that you know it has that dated reference, I mean it was written in two thousand and six, the article itself phenomenal. I'll be referencing it a lot in this episode, and I highly recommend if you're more interested in the technical details that you check it out. It's great. So, as Weber points out, the early development of plasma displays, that work wasn't being

done with home television as being an end goal. In fact, it wasn't even in the thought process at the time necessarily. Instead, this was part of an effort to develop computer systems that could be used for the purposes of education. So, how do you make a high resolution display for educational computer systems and do so in a way that makes sense doesn't break the bank. So engineers and researchers at the University of Illinois launched a project called the Programmed

Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, or PLATO. This was in nineteen sixty when they first formed this project, and plato's main aim was to research the possibilit of using computer systems for educational purposes. Now today, millions of students around the world do their homework on computers. They get class assignments on computers. Computers are like an integral part of

education for lots of schools around the world. However, back in nineteen sixty computers were still these big, centralized machines that very few people had ever seen, let alone used. If you were a computer science student, or you know, if you worked at a research lab or perhaps some military installation, then maybe you had some contact with computers. I mean computer science, certainly you would have some contact. But other than that, these were things that you heard

about but you never really encountered. Even as computers began to make their way into the business world, very few people still actually had the chance to get their hands on them because these were still largely centralized machines. That would pretty much remain the case until micro computers came

on the scene in the seventies and eighties. But anyway, the folks on the Plato project were forward thinkers, and in nineteen sixty four, Donald L. Bitzer and Jene Slatto, both of whom were professors at the University of Illinois, and apologies for my terrible pronunciation, but they, along with a graduate student named Robert Wilson, tackled this challenge of building a new display system that would be suitable for the latest iteration of the project's computer, which at that

point was the Plato three. They were up to the third generation of this computer system. So this next bit gets technical, but it's also an example of a fortuitous discovery that only happened because of an accident. As doctor Frankenfurter would say, So, okay, it's the nineteen sixties swing in sixties and semiconductor based memory has yet to really become a thing, so that's not really an accessible technology

if you're designing a computer system. Still, your graphics displays need access to memory in order to you know, display stuff like bitmaps, so it's not just like a blip on the screen. It's actually a sustained image. So a bitmap is literally just a map of bits that represent light, and older displays relied upon an external scan converter memory tube in order to achieve this memory. These things, I mean, they're external, so they're not part of the system itself.

They were bulky, They were expensive, and they were kind of limiting in order to actually have this computer memory. It was a big deal. So the team was trying to figure out how to achieve memory internally in the display itself and they started to work with neon. Now, this neon depended upon a vacuum system for it to work, but it turned out that the system they were using as they were developing this display actually had a little bit of a leak in it. And that's the accident

I was talking about. There was a leak in the vacuum system and that allowed some air to mix with the neon. However, that turned out to actually be beneficial to the project because when the neon gas with this mix of air in it would be excited, it would emit an orange glow. Now, normally, if it were just pure neon, if there were no other gases mixing with the neon, that glowing would stop once the excited electrons returned to their normal state. Essentially, once the electric charge

was turned off, it would just stop glowing. However, that mixed air caused something interesting, and that's hysteresis. And if you're wondering what the heck that is, allow me to explain, because I just learned about it myself, So I know about this, but I didn't know the word for it. So hysteresis refers to the tendency of some phenomena to

linger after the cause of that phenomena has already gone. So, for example, let's say you make an electromagnet out of an iron nail and some copper wire, and you coil the copper wire around the nail. You connect the wire to a battery. You got yourself an electromagnet, and you use it for a while to pick up paper clips or whatever. And then maybe once you're done, you've disconnected the wire from the battery, you've taken the nail out

of the coil. Maybe you notice that, hey, this nail still is displaying some magnetic qualities that can still pick up paper clips, even though it's no longer inside the coil with electricity running through it. It's no longer an electromagnet. It's acting more like a magnet. Well, that's hysteresis. The electric current that generated the magnetic field is gone, but the nail retains some magnetism, at least for a while. It does fade over time and eventually just becomes a nail.

So with the neon display, the mixed and air caused the neon to remain lit up after the charge had left, so the display kind of had a memory, so to speak. That was the solution to their problem, and again it was all due to an accident. So this discovery prompted the researchers to change their approach. They would purposefully introduce a tiny bit of nitrogen into the neon gas in order to accomplish on purpose what had first happened by accident,

which is a pretty darn cool story. I love stories like that where you know, surely we would have arrived at this discovery at some point, but the fact that it happened by sort of luck, and in what you would first think was bad luck because it relies on your equipment not working the way it was intended to that, to me is pretty cool. Now. I think it also helps if we consider for a moment how plasma displays work, like that's going to help us understand a lot about

this topic. So let's get to some basics. Images on televisions and other displays, those are made up of pixels, and you can think of pixels as being kind of like at it's a basic unit of light. On a screen, it's a point of light. So the full screen is made up of thousands or millions of pixels, depending upon the resolution of your screen. Typically, these pixels have one of three colors associated with them, red, green, or blue. Or they have subpixels like little cells filled with red phosphor,

green phosphor or blue phosphor. These RGB pixels are spread evenly across the screen, so by controlling the brightness the luminosity of each of those three colors, you can show potentially millions of different shades of color. If you light all three of those subpixels equally, you get white, right.

If you like none of them, you get black. If you like combinations of them at different intensities, like you know, like forty percent red, ten percent blue, etea that kind of thing, then you can get lots of other different colors represented on screen. In a plasma television, the pixels are made up of individual cells that are sandwich between

other layers. I'll give you the typical outline of how this works, because it depends specifically on the manufacturer and what method they used, but generally speaking, we can get an idea of how this works. But inside these individual cells that are sandwiched between other layers, you have an ionized gas. In other words, of plasma. Plasma is the most plentiful state of matter in the universe. So when I was a kid, I was taught about three states

of matter, solid liquid, gas. Plasma is technically a fourth state of matter. It's a special kind of gas. It's a gas that has free floating electrons, which means that can do stuff like conduct electricity. Stars are made out

of plasma. Anyway, if you have plasma in a contained environment, like an enclosed air type tube, and you apply voltage to this tube, then you have electrons that are rushing around, and you have positively charged atoms rushing around, and the electrons are heading to the positively charged atoms, and the positively charged atoms are heading toward the negatively charged electrons.

Because you know, opposite charges attract and when they collide, you get excited atoms, and those atoms eventually let out some of that excess energy in the form of photons aka light. Now, with a lot of gases, the light that's being released is actually invisible to us. It's in the ultraviolet range, so we cannot directly perceive this light. However, in turn, this ultraviolet light can excite special atoms called phosphors, and some phosphors can emit light that is within the

visible spectrum. So you excite the gas atoms and you get ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet light in turn excites the phosphors, and then you get visible light. Okay, we're going to take a quick break here. When we get back, we're going to talk about that sandwich I mentioned earlier, and I'm going to try not to have my stomach growl because it's also lunchtime sandwiches. We'll be right back. Okay, all right, we're back. I still haven't eaten lunch, so

we're gonna see how this goes. But if we do think of a plasma display as a kind of sandwich, the typical description of plasma displays goes something like this. Your bottom piece of bread. The base of your sandwich is a plate of glass, which I admit does not sound that appetizing. On top of this plate of glass, you have a series of vertically aligned electrodes, so they're

columns of electrodes. This is called the address electrodes. Then you would have the layer of cells that contain the gas that can be turned into a plasma once you apply voltage to this gas, plus the cells that have the subpixels coated in red, green, or blue phosphors, each one assigned to one of the these cells of gas. Then you have another layer that's a clear magnesium oxide layer. This is to protect the next layer, which is another layer of electrodes. Now these are arranged at a ninety

degree angle compared to the first ones. The address electrodes that are on the bottom right, So these are in rows. These are the display electrodes, and they by necessity need to be transparent because the light needs to be able to go through them in order for you to see what's on a display. So now you actually have a grid of electrodes. Right, You've got some that are running along the bottom and vertical columns and some that are running on the top and horizontal rows. Next you have

a dielectric material that insulates those display electrodes. And finally you have the front plate of glasses the top slice of bread on your sandwich. These displays are able to send a specific voltage to a pair of electrodes at

a specific point on the display. You can think of the display as just being a series of xy coordinates, so you can see and end a voltage signal to that pair of electrodes specifically at one location on the screen in order for them to excite the gas inside the cell, which then of course gives off ultraviolet light, which in turn excites the phosphors coding the subpixels for that cell, and then you get a point of light

on the display. Of course, this is actually happening at different points all across the display at the same time, and it's rapidly changing, right. That's how you get your moving plasma image. All of those points of light on a plasma display are coming from specific voltages applied at precise locations on that grid of electrodes, thus exciting the gas in that spot that then excites the phosphors, which to me is super cool. Like, that's such a neat

approach to creating an image on a screen. I just think it's incredibly interesting. I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm a geek. Now, one benefit to this approach is that you don't need as much depth to your display as you would with a CRT, so remember I said that CRT televisions are chonky. Well, a cathode ray two displays width determines how deep it has to be because the wider the screen is, the longer the tube needs to be in order for the electron gun to

be able to reach across the entire width of the screen. Like, larger screens get really super bulky. It's kind of like having a projector, right, Like if you have a projector and you're too close to a screen, well, the image that you're projecting isn't going to take up the whole screen. It's just going to take a part of it. You have to move the projector back in order for it to take up the whole screen. Same thing with these

cathode ray tube electron guns. They need to be a certain distance from the back of the screen in order to illuminate the whole thing. So the bigger your screen is, the further back the electron gun needs to be, so the larger the television would get. And you just get these enormous, heavy, bulky TVs and it wouldn't make sense beyond a certain amount, which is why you would get

like projection televisions instead. If you want a really big screen, you need to either have a projector and a screen, or you needed to have like rear projection, which was still bulky, but not as big as if it were CRT. So plasma displays didn't need to have so much depth to them because the electrode grid does the same job that the electron gun did in a CRT essentially, and so plasma displays could be much thinner than CRTs were now.

By much thinner, I do mean, they still were thick compared to the flat screen televisions you would buy today. Like we're talking like six inches thick. That's still pretty hefty if you compare it to the sort of stuff you can buy, you know, in a store today. I mean, some of the latest televisions are incredibly thin, but back in the nineteen nineties, a six inch deep TV that

was velt. Anyway, It obviously would take quite some time between pioneering this technology in nineteen sixty four and seeing plasma televisions available in stores around nineteen ninety seven. I mean, that's like three decades of time. So let's go back to the history for a bit to look at some of the milestones that led the way. Now as Weber points out in that excellent article I mentioned at the top of the show the plasma display researchers at the

University of Illinois. The thing they built it was great for establishing that this was a viable technology, but their display was a far cry from being suitable for commercial or consumer applications. For one thing, the display itself measured a total of one inch per side, so a one inch by one inch screen. I think we can both

agree that's a bit on the small side, right. But for another, it was made of some really fragile material, so it wouldn't stand up to any sort of rigorous shipping for example, much less like if you had kids or pets, or maybe you like to play the Wii and you don't use the risks straps, you know, like you're instructed to come on be more responsible gamers. Anyway, it was also kind of cluged together, this prototype display. It had like really visible epoxy holding it together, and

they had problems with leaks and stuff like that. So in short, the display panel showed that plasma displays could work, but there were a lot of challenges that would need to be addressed before it could approach being a reliable display option, let alone a consumer television. So development continued and within just a couple of years there were some breakthroughs that saw massive improvements in design and that led to the ability to do a little bit more streamline

manufacturing and the displays were able to develop. As a result, they were still small, and they still had fairly low resolution, but the improvements showed that plasma based displays could in fact be a reality. Each success drove more innovation in the space and allowed for larger displays with greater resolution. So by nineteen seventy one, a glass company called Owen's Illinois was able to produce the first commercial plasma display.

Now by today's standards, this was a pretty low resolution display. It measured only five hundred twelve by five hundred twelve pixels, so that meant the display had a little more than two hundred and sixty thousand pixels in total if you were to add them all up. Future high definition plasma televisions could have as many as more than two million pixels.

But still, this twelve inch display made by Owens Illinois was a big deal, and the Plato Project at the University of Illinois became the first customer to order these displays as part of their Plato Educational Computer System project, and as Weber points out, it was a remarkably quick turnaround to go from the first implementation of the technology in nineteen sixty four to a finished product in nineteen

seventy one. I mean that's like, well seven years, that's really fast for a brand new technology to go from we just proved that this works to here's a product based on that tech. Many other technical issues had to be solved for plasma TVs to become a practical possibility, Like, even with the advancements that had been done by nineteen seventy one, we were a far cry from something that

would be acceptable in a home. For one thing, the early displays were monochromatic, right, like, they did not have full color capability for the earliest versions. It would take some time to develop that. And even with chromatic displays, there were still challenges. One of those was solving for gray scale right, different levels of brightness so that you could have something between the brightest bright and the darkest dark. So in the early days of plasma displays, a pixel

could either be on or it could be off. It was either as bright as it could be or it was dark. You had nothing in between, so there was no way of showing any kind of resolution within an image.

In the early nineteen seventies, companies like Hitachi and Mitsubishi came up with a method to deal with this, and essentially it involved cutting down the length of time each pixel would fire, so you would create like pulses that would light up a pixel, and to make a pixel less bright, you would just pulse it less frequently, and that would make it appear to be dimmer than the

neighboring pixels and thus would allow for grayscale. It was known as the address while display method the AWD method, and it would remain in use for several years before engineers found alternative methods to achieve similar results. Now to get color displays rather than monochromatic ones, engineers figured out that placing little glass ribs in between the subpixels was key, otherwise you would get these weird kind of saturated images.

Everything would come across kind of pastel. You didn't get very vibrant color representation in early color plasma displays because there was all this bleeding that was going on between different pixels. So by adding these thin panels of glass. It meant that each color of phosphors, the red, the green, and the blue phosphors would kind of have their own mini cell that was bordered by these thin glass panels.

So why was this important, Well, it's because ultraviolet light doesn't travel through glass, so it became possible to more precisely control which phosphors would be excited by ultraviolet light and thus phosphores and so you could be much more

precise with which colors are being activated. And with that control, you got more accurate color representation on the screen and you didn't have to worry about pixels bleeding over into each other because you were able to prevent that due to these glass panels blocking the ultraviolet light that otherwise would excite phosphors and cause them to discharge. So again, very clever solution to a problem, creating these these glass ribs,

that's what they called them. So in nineteen seventy eight, the Japanese Broadcast Corporation, which has the initialism NHK, built a prototype full color plasma television. Way back in nineteen seventy eight. It measured sixteen inches on the diagonal, and this was a concept. It wasn't meant for manufacturing as an end product. It was not ready for mass manufacturing. It was just kind of a proof of concept television, and it showed the possibilities of a flatter TV, which

really excited manufacturers. I mean, these would be electronics that could take up less space and perhaps be thin enough where you could even mount it to your wall, kind of like a picture frame. That was, you know, sort of a dream back in the nineteen seventies. Otherwise, what you're going to have to do is cut a hole in your wall, mount a CRT so that the screen points through the hole, and hope that your wall is

thick enough to hold the rest of the CRT. Otherwise you have the back end of a television sticking into the kitchen or something. So it would take nearly two decades before we would actually get to the first consumer plasma televisions after NHK introduced this prototype, but again, the prototype showed the possibility of what could be further in the future. Other challenges involved figuring out how to protect phosphors from degradation, so early plasma displays had issues with luminescence.

In fact, all plasma displays due to some degree, and part of the problem was that the displays would grow more dim as they were used more, particularly for plasma displays that used alternating current. And let me explain why that was. So. With direct current, you have two electrodes, right, You've got one that's always the cathode, and then you have another electrode and it's always the anode. Well, the

cathode generates ions, and those ions could damage phosphors. So when you were designing a DC based plasma display, it only made sense to put the phosphors closer to the anode side than the cathode side, because you were distancing them from these ions, and it meant that they were less likely to get damage and thus lose some of

their luminescence in the process. However, AC alternating current based plasma displays had a problem because with alternating current, the role of cathode and anode switches places between the electrodes many times a second, and this is the alternating bit of alternating current. Right, The cathode and anode swap multiple times a second, So the electrode that serves as the

cathode one moment becomes the anode the next moment. But this meant that you couldn't just put the phosphors closer to one electrode rather than the other, because both of the electrodes are the cathode at some point many times

per second. Fujitsu came up with a solution by placing the two sets of electrodes closer to one another, separated by a dielectric layer to prevent electrical shorts, and the phosphors would, rather than being in between the two layers, would kind of be above them, and the electric fields generated by those elects would be enough to excite the gas within the cells that were positioned above this very tight sandwich of electrodes, the phosphors could have the distance

needed to protect them from those pesky ions. Okay, I've got a couple more things to say about the limitations of plasma displays as well as their ultimate fate, but before we get to all that, let's take another quick break. Okay. I mentioned before the break that there were other issues with plasma displays, and I kind of mentioned one. Degradation is related to this, but it's in general, it's just brightness. So plasma displays they just had a limit to how

bright they could be. Luminosity would be an issue for plasma displays throughout their history. If you were to compare a plasma display to an alternative like an LCD flat panel television, then the LCD would look brighter than the plasma display. You've got both showing the exact same video feed at the same time. Unless you've gone in and messed with settings to purposefully dim the LCD screen, it's

going to be brighter than the plasma one. The plasma screens had incredible contrast ratios, but they didn't stand up to the brightness of LCDs, and so in store showrooms they weren't as bright and didn't attract as much attention. But let's talk about contrast ratios for a moment, because that is important. So this refers to the difference between the brightest colors that can be displayed on a screen and the darkest colors that can be displayed on that screen.

So with an LCD display, you wouldn't get as wide a contrast ratio, meaning you didn't have as many degrees of differentiation between the darkest darks and the brightest brights, and that's because of a backlight. Plasma displays could either have pixels were on or off, and an off pixel would be almost pure black, not quite but close. So those pixels just wouldn't be active, so they'd be dark, but the pixel next door might be as bright as

it possibly could be. So the contrast ratio on a plasma display is pretty remarkable typically, So in practice, this meant you could watch stuff like a movie in which a dark object is moving across a dark background and you'd still be able to make out what was going on. I can't tell you how many times I've watched horror movies on a television that uses a backlight, and I'm spending the whole time going what's happening. I don't even know if I should be scared right now because I

can't see what's happening. So with a plasma display, if you're watching a movie like that or something like, you know, like one of the darker Batman films, it'd be great because you could actually see what was happening on screen. Meanwhile, with LCD displays, you have that backlight that's shining through the entire display all the time. The back lights just active.

With the early LCD televisions. That is so LCDs are made up of You can think of them as a series of tiny little screens that have these liquid crystals in them, and those liquid crystals can either allow light to pass through or they can try to block that light. But even when the crystals are blocking light, there's still

a little light that's bleeding through. It's kind of like if you have a window shade, like a thin window shade, and you pull it down and you're blocking light on a bright sunny day, but you can still see that there's light behind the shade because it's not thick enough

to block all that light. It's the same sort of thing, and that means if you're watching something that's set in a really dark location, then some of the light from the back light is still making its way through the crystals that are supposed to shield you from that light, and you end up with kind of more of a charcoal gray than a truly like pure black screen. So if you have a dark figure moving around across a dark background, you might not be able to tell the

difference between the figure and the background at all. So movies like you know, Batman and those horror films and stuff, they might be really hard to follow. The plasma screen was perfect for representing the mini subtle shades, specifically of darker colors. It just couldn't reach the levels of brightness

that you would get with alternative technologies. Now, there are tons of other advancements that we could talk about here, but they all get even more technical, and as I mentioned earlier, Weber does a phenomenal job outlining them all. So again I recommend you search for the article. It's titled History of the Plasma Display Panel by Weber web Er if you want to learn more about the technical hurdles that engineers had to clear in order to make

plasma televisions a reality. Some of the issues get very persnickety and the solutions were really creative. But yeah, this episode would be like two hours long if I went into every single one of them, and they do get pretty pretty specific, So check out that are to learn more. Let's just get back to the high points of the

history as a consumer technology. So by the mid nineteen nineties, things were getting to a point where a consumer plasma television was a possibility and Fujitsu would lead the way and people were impressed. When Fujitsu introduced this plasma TV, it was forty two inches on the diagonal, and it was much much much thinner than a CRT, even a CRT of a relatively small screen size like a twelve

inch television. It had more depth than one of these plasma televisions did, so it took up way less space at least on a depth perspective, and forty two inches was really impressive. So remember CRTs had to be bulkier if you wanted a larger screen. And it also meant that the screen aspect ratio was different. It was now sixteen to nine instead of four to three. Again, that's for every nine units tall, it's sixteen units wide versus for every three units it's four units wide. That does

make a difference. Like that's why again, if you watch old TV programming you get those bars on either side of the screen because the old televisions worked on a different aspect ratio than modern ones do. One thing that remained a problem for early plasma televisions was burn in, So this happened if a plasma TV screen was left displaying the same image for a really long time. This

often would happen with folks who were video gamers. Right if you paused a game and walked off and you left the TV on and it stayed on that screen for a long time, you could get burn in. So what would happen is that the phosphors would heat up because they're being excited by this ultraviolet light. They're continuing to display images through luminescing, and as they would heat up, they would get damaged, and that would mean that you

would get some degradation there. They'd lose their own so that the next time they're illuminated, they aren't as bright as they were before. And that meant if you started watching anything else the affected phosphors, the ones that were burnt out, they would appear to be a little dimmer than they were supposed to be, and it would be like you were looking at a shadow of that image that had been held on the screen for far too long.

This was burn in, and it would end up being one of the drawbacks to early plasma televisions, and it also was a selling point for salespeople who are pushing LCD televisions over plasma televisions. Even later, plasma televisions still had to contend with burn in like that was an issue that remained a problem, although different manufacturers found ways to mitigate it to some extent so that it wasn't as likely, but it could still happen. It was never

eliminated fully. Now, one advantage plasma televisions had over backlit TVs was that manufacturers could make them really big, like more than one hundred in on the diagonal big, if you really wanted to. However, it was hard to go the other way. It was hard to make smaller plasma televisions. Now you might say, well, that doesn't make sense. The very first plasma display was one inch by one inch. How much smaller are you going to get? When I say it was hard, I don't mean that it was

technically hard. It was hard to make them so that you could sell them for a reasonable amount of money. Smaller televisions, those that were like thirty two inches or smaller. It was hard to produce plasma displays of that size and still have them make economic sense. You started to run up against an issue where customers wouldn't be willing to spend the money it would take in order to make a profit off of making these things, because it would feel like you're spending more money to get less

real estate. However, if you did want to go bigger. Plasma was a really good choice in the early days, like plasma was cheaper on the larger end than LCD based televisions. But the battle was on between plasma and lcdtvs, and this got way more complicated in the mid two thousands upon the introduction of LED backlt televisions. So these

were LCDs that used LEDs for that backlight. They were brighter than plasma screens, so you could use them in brightly lit rooms and that would not really be an issue. They didn't have as good an angle of view like with plasma TVs. You could be way off to one side or the other and still have a good view of what's happening on the screen, whereas with LEDs there was more of a limitation there. And they also had

a lower contrast ratio than plasma screens. We mentioned that already. However, LED screens consumed way less power than plasma televisions did, so your electric bill would be lower if you're using an LED backlit LCD television rather than a plasma television. That brightness issue, though, I think that was the real killer, because if you were a consumer and you were shopping for televisions and you went to a retail store, you would see the difference right in front of you. Right.

The plasma screens just weren't as bright as the LCD TVs with led backlight. Color representation with plasma was amazing, but that brightness issue caused a lot of people to balk. I mean, a lot of these stores just are under these bright fluorescent lights, and plasma TVs just didn't look

as vibrant. There were some that would use like a darkened area to show off the televisions, and plasma televisions probably did a little better there, but generally, unless you were someone who was big into the in home theater setup, you probably weren't thinking in terms of I'm going to watch this in a darkened cave. You know, you might be watching it in a living room with lots of natural light and stuff, and you want to have a screen you can actually see. So the LCD television started

to perform better in sales. Again. For gamers, the plasma televisions represented a dangerous investment. If you did put your game on pause so you could wolf down some pizza or whatever, you did so knowing that you might accidentally burn in an image of solid snake hiding in a cardboard box or something on your screen, and then you know, when it came time to watch Mean Girls or whatever, you'd have this shadow image of solid snake on Wednesdays

when we're supposed to wear pink. It's a total bummer, dude. The LED backlighting alternative presented a real challenge because earlier LCD televisions were about the same thickness as plasma displays. They weren't that different, but the introduction of an LED backlight meant that manufacturers could make televisions even more slim than they already had been. So here you had even thinner screens that were more energy efficient and sometimes could

provide even better resolution than plasma screens. The color representation on a plasma screen might be superior, but the actual picture quality and the brightness could be better on an LCD television with LED backlight. So plasma began to give way to these alternative technologies, much to the chagrin of devoted plasma TV fans. Now, for the manufacturers, this meant that plasma televisions were less marketable than LED TV, that you would make less money if you stuck with plasma

than you would if you went with LED. So one by one, manufacturers began to pull the plug on plasma television production. Plus, once we got past twenty ten, we started seeing innovative work in O LEAD screens, organic LED displays, as well as the introduction of ultra high definition television.

We're talking like four K TV at this point, and that was a real blow to plasma television because a lot more work was going to be needed to make plasma TVs capable of displaying UHD resolutions like they could do high resolution, but it would take even more innovation in the space to create a technology that would allow plasma to display four K resolution. With LED backlet displays,

four K was a more achievable goal. There was less of an on ramp needed to achieve four K resolution with that technology, So that was another big blow against plasma and with that decline in interest in the market and this these hefty technical challenges that were in the way, companies opted to phase out plasma television in favor of

LED and then OLED displays. The last major manufacturers making plasma screens got out of the game in twenty fourteen, as I mentioned earlier, so the last decade for the last decade, rather, plasma televisions have been kind of an abandoned technology now. Personally, I think plasma TV technology was incredible. I never owned a plasma television, that I always wanted one because the colors were so beautiful on those screens.

And you know, I am of the opinion that once you reach a certain level of resolution, depending on how far away you are from viewing your television and how big the screen is, you get diminishing returns. Right Like the way I have my setup at home, I just have a regular HDTV. I don't even have a four K TV setup in my living room, and partly because of the size of the screen and how far away

I am from it, I don't really notice. Like if I had swapped it out for a four K screen, I probably would be able to tell a little bit, but it wouldn't be dramatic. Right, So, for me, resolution was not necessarily the most important factor for a television. Now. Granted, if I had one hundred and twenty inch screen and I was sitting like four feet away from it, I probably would need a very high resolution screen or out

so I would start seeing the limitations. That's just not how I view TV, so it's not a big deal for me. For me, color representation is a more important part of it. So yeah, plasma TV really would appeal to me in that regard, But it's a moot point. It is a thing of the past. I think it still served to be an enormous leap over cathode ray tube technology, but ultimately alternatives to plasma were more practical

and arguably more capable in the long run. Plasma TVs or plasma displays, I should say, are still used in various industries for different reasons, but when it comes to home televisions, it's officially a thing of the past. So I hope you enjoyed this look back on plasma technology and how it worked in plasma televisions. Curious if any of y'all out there have a plasma TV that you still use. I know a lot of people like they

upgrade their televisions fairly regularly. I'm one of those old dudes who just buys a TV and uses it till it don't work no more. So. My television is not a smart TV. It is not an Ultrahi definition television. It is hooked up to a smart TV device. So I do get those capabilities, and technically the device is capable of showing four K resolution. It's just my television can't do that, so it's kind of a lost feature

for me. But yeah, maybe in a different past I would have been like one of those diehard plasma TV fans. I certainly saw the appeal of plasma television. I just never bought one. Anyway. That's it for this episode. I hope all of you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.