Technology in today’s world is constantly evolving. This is especially true for such an important device as your home TV. Manufacturers are constantly striving to improve the picture quality of your home TV and its energy efficiency. Not surprisingly, new technologies often appear and old ones die out. That’s exactly what happened with plasma TVs.
I remember a time when any “thin” TV with a great picture screamed plasma. It was considered a guarantee of quality and if you had one in your home, you were one of those who had a premium TV. However, very quickly their popularity disappeared and they were discontinued. This was due to the advent of a worthy opponent.
Why have plasma TVs become popular?
Plasma TVs became popular in their day because they were much thinner than the outdated CRT TVs. They also offered the best possible picture quality and very wide viewing angles without distortion. However, first, you should understand how plasma TVs worked in the first place.
They had little gas pockets in their structure which gave out light when electricity flowed through them. When that light hit the phosphor, it became visible and was used to create the image you saw on the screen. So each pixel had three colors – red, green and blue. These colors were combined to create the final image on your screen.
These TVs didn’t need backlighting and were self-replicating. They have a very good contrast ratio because they can turn some pixels off when you want better black. It also allowed these TVs to have fast response times, high refresh rates and wide viewing angles. It is these features that allowed plasma TVs to become so popular among users.
Why have manufacturers stopped making plasma TVs?
Despite all the advantages plasma TVs have significant disadvantages that have forced manufacturers to abandon the production of these TVs. This was mainly due to the fact that plasma TVs turned out to be more expensive to produce and they were less perfect than the new OLED TVs.
However, plasma TVs also had their own problems that users did not like. For example, problems such as ghost images on your TV. Plasma TVs were also very hot and had high power consumption. Another problem was low brightness. The thing is that Plasma TVs could provide brightness at 100 nits, while modern TVs can be even brighter than 1000 nits.
The increase in temperature made the TVs big and bulky. Of course, they were still thinner than before, but compared to today’s TVs they were very large. And after LED backlit TVs came out, manufacturers realized that it would just be too expensive to make a plasma TV with the same size and screen extension. That is why sometime in 2014 the production of plasma TVs almost completely stopped.
Read also:
- How to connect surround sound to TV with HDMI
- How to fix the fuzzy or blurry screen on your TV
- What is a VGA cable and where is it used?
What alternatives can you buy to replace your old plasma TV?
If you still have plasma TVs in your home, you should replace them as soon as possible. This is not only due to the fact that this way you can improve the picture quality of your TV and get a better technique, but also due to the fact that modern TVs are much less energy consuming. This means that modern OLED TVs can help you save money.
Also, the era of 4K content is now beginning. No plasma TV can give you a 4K picture. However, if you use an OLED or even a QD-OLED TV, you can get 4K and even 8K in some cases. Also, OLD TVs have wider viewing angles and much brighter images.
So if you ask me, I would say that the best alternative is an OLED TV. They cost pretty adequate money right now and give you a lot of different features. Including access to Smart TV features. So you can go to the store now and upgrade your outdated TV.
