Ok, here I go again. Long story short this time. I bought this
http://shop.panasonic.com/shop/model/TC-P60U50 for $699 on clearance at Fry's a little over a month ago. How could anyone resist this Panny plasma at this price??? Back up to $1199 again, tho. And it went in and out of stock and was removed from the web site a few times already. To make it smart, I bought an android emulator dongle cheap off Amazon for $80. No 3D, but for the giant difference in price, I didn't want 3D anyway.
My point I tried to make earlier in more detail was this. Crappy video sources like 720p and 480p broadcasts and standard definition DVDs tend to look better on LCD TVs. Where as plasmas are very unforgiving of poor source material. But if you put the same test blu-ray (with a high sampling bit rate) on a plasma and on an LCD, the plasma will bury the LCD in picture quality, almost every time. And where do most cheap LCD TVs nowadays seem to be most often sold? Why, Walmart, of course. And what video source material do the Walmart's around me usually have playing? Over the air HD broadcasts, which around here, are often 720p or less. And add in the glaring bright lights, and in every case the plasticized matte LCD screens appear at least twice as good as the glossy glass screened plasma's do. So you can see that with this double whammy against the plasmas, Walmart sells more LCD or LED LCD TVs. It's just that simple.
That is why they don't sell as well.
It's not the heat, or the weight, or the thickness. It's the fact the retailers are just doing a piss poor job of displaying them, and even Fry's, Best Buy, Conn's and other "electronics" places are often just as guilty of poor TV displays.
Now, I can understand someone steering away from a 60" plasma to a 60" LED LCD because of severe room glare they may have, and that alone is a really valid point for many people.
But weight, thickness or heat over HD picture quality? If someone told me they bought a large screen LCD TV just because it was an inch thinner or lighter or cooler than a plasma, I would LOL in their face and call them an idiot, because they are. That's like buying the first car you see that's white, just because you want to buy a white car, and completely ignoring what's under the hood or what the gas mileage is or how many passengers it holds.
If this was an exclusively home theater type of forum, anyone claiming they would by a TV based solely on those 3 factors alone would be laughed off the forums in a second, but not here. We have more of a melting pot of consumers here, some buy cheap, some buy expensive, and some buy for... cosmetic purposes... (shudder). But that's the way it is.
And I really don't blame the plasma manufacturers at all for poor marketing, like some do, but I blame the retailers 100% for their demise through poor display practices.
Now, back to another point that needs making. I have had more personal experience with LCDs than I can count, from multiple monitors, to laptops to several 46" LCD TVs I bought about 5 years ago.
One was a 60hz Sharp with terrible banding issues I made Sharp replace with a newer model, that had zero banding issues. And a 120hz Samsung that was so poorly assembled the bezel around the screen was literally coming off all around it, and they had to replace it with a new bezel. 6 screws would have held it in place, but some engineering genius said "Let's use sticky tape, and see how long that lasts, it's CHEAP!" The replacement bezel used something that looked like liquid nails, and I never had it separate from the screen. This TV is also very buggy in its operation, too, but amazingly it still works, original crappy capacitors and all.
There is simply on comparison to the Panasonic plasma, at all. The Plasma looks life like, like a CRT does. Remember those? Us old farts sure do. Live news broadcasts over the air in 1080i are simply stunning to watch. It's like I can reach into the screen and pick the hair out of their nose. The LCDs, by comparison, simply do not have that depth perception, or the enormous color saturation (blacks included) which comes with the extreme contrast ratios. The LCDs, viewing the same source, look a bit fuzzy or cloudy by comparison, and the motion blur is definitely evident, and on many video sources. It's almost like looking at a cartoon version of a live broadcast or a blu-ray.
On my LCDs, no matter how much I screw around with settings, it's obvious to me there is just something not right about the image, and a bit artificial looking about it. And the brand new LED LCDs I was looking at had the same exact artificial weirdness look to them that I notice on my other LCDs. I think this all boils down to the fundamental difference between the 2 displays.
Plasmas naturally display motion effects better because the phosphors are so fast and active, where as on the LCDs, they are relying more on using hardware and software to try to duplicate motion effects. Just like some people seem to be more sensitive to the sparkling rainbow effects on the DLPs, I seem to be really put off now by all the other stuff they have to do to a LCD to make it look more like a plasma reacts naturally, if that makes any sense.
And I think this is also why poor video sources like 480p and standard definition DVDs look so much better on a LCD than a plasma, simply because the LCD is masking the poor video source better, because of the artificial look to the display.
And another thing, people with cable or satellite are only adding another layer of video compression and noise using those as opposed to over the air HDTV broadcasts, so again, in those cases with a degraded picture, the LCD SEEMS to be better than the plasmas, but only because the plasmas show it like it is, without masking the true picture with a level of artificiality to it like the LCDs do.
Yes, it's a wall of text.
And the same people who only buy a TV for weight, thinness or heat likely will be the same people who refuse to read this.
But to those who do read it and care about picture quality, thank you for reading it anyhow.
Since I don't post much around here anymore, I felt I deserved a little breathing room. :whiste:
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