Sub Field Drive – Plasma Panel Basics
A Plasma panel display has near instantaneous response times on the order of 2 milliseconds. What this implies is that a plasma TV subpixel is only alight for a fraction of a second. Typically, most conventional Plasma TVs display video at 60fps (research has shown that the human eye cannot tell any significant difference in motion and smoothness of videos at higher frame rates). This implies that each frame has to be displayed for 1/60 or 17ms. However, the sub pixels of a plasma TV stay alight only for around 2ms when excited. Thus, to display a single frame for 1/60 seconds, the plasma panel excites the sub-pixels in pulses so as to keep all the pixels “bright” so that they can continuously display the desired frame.
Thus, for example, a 60Hz plasma panel can have 10 pulses per frame, to display the image. Effectively, the screen is being refreshed 60Hz times 10 pulses/frame which gives us a value of 600Hz. This is what Plasma manufacturers refer to as the Sub field drive refresh rate. If the Plasma panel performs 8 pulses per frame, it gives a sub field drive refresh rate of 480Hz. Now when the displayed frame has to be changed to the next frame, the ultra-fast response times of the Plasma TV sub pixels enables an almost instantaneous transition to the next frame.
As a result, even though only 60 frames are displayed per second by the Plasma TV, the near instantaneous transition between frames drastically minimizes motion blur and image ghosting. While the subfield drive terminology is a bit misleading as each frame is not being updated 600 times a second, it still portrays the inherent advantage of Plasma TVs when it comes to fast moving content due to its near instantaneous pixel response times.
