First plasma tv im blown away

Discussion in 'The HTPC, HDTV & Ultra High Definition section' started by Lowki, Mar 6, 2015.

  1. Lowki

    Lowki Master Guru

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    Hey guys I just got to say I recently came across a 1080p 50 inch Samsung plasma display second hand (pn50a650t1fxza). Still I cant even go back to gaming on an lcd anymore. I didn't realize the massive difference in motion blur. Anyone else gaming on an plasma display?
     
  2. drandiiski

    drandiiski Maha Guru

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    My only firs hand experience with plasma was a 50” Panasonic, don’t know the model, but it was from 2012-2013. Had it for about two weeks. The picture was great at night, with deep blacks and smooth motion. At day it was too washed out, lacking brightness and contrast. But my main gripe with it was the TERRIBLE flickering. Not sure what it was that flickered, I don’t think plasmas have a backlight, but it was close to unbearable. After two hours in front of it I felt sick, to the point that I wasn’t able to watch the Dark Knight Rises and switched to my monitor for the last 30mins.

    It wasn’t mine so after the two weeks I gave it back to my friend – he got it before his apartment was finished. I went and got myself a 47’ LED Panasonic from the same year with identical bezel, remote and all. Same room, same position, same everything. Very different experience. The blacks of course were immediately noticeably worse, but the brightness and contrast, especially during the day were so much better. And no flickering. Not at all. I still have it and use it every day and never felt that flickering sickness.

    So that’s my firsthand experience with plasma displays. Other than that I’ve seen old plasmas that had terrible ghosting issues and their proud owners using zoomed picture when watching TV so the TV logo does not burn in into the matrix.

    Sorry if that’s not what you wanted to hear. Of course I can’t comment on your TV, because I’ve never seen it. It may not suffer from this. Also worth mentioning is that the displays I used mostly for gaming. And one more thing – have two other friends with a bit older 55’ plasma Panasonics. Terrible flickering there too, but they don’t seem to notice it no matter how I tried to show it to them. So maybe I’m more sensitive to that.
     
  3. Frances

    Frances Active Member

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    Gaming isn't recommended on plasma displays due to burn in, but when I did game on a plasma it wasn't all that special IMO. Perhaps you don't like the interpolation that some LCDs have on by default. It creates an average of sequential frames and appears to increase framerate and decreases motion blur. I can't stand it. It makes movies look like they were shot on an old school VHS video camera. Plasmas do have a completely different way of refreshing than LCDs. LCD panels refresh the whole frame at a set rate usually 60, 120 or 240hz. Plasmas have 10 subfields that refresh at 60hz, some manufactures claim it is "600hz" but this is just false advertising.
     
  4. Loobyluggs

    Loobyluggs Ancient Guru

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    I use a Panasonic Plasma for console gaming and can truly say it totally pwns, technically speaking.
     

  5. drandiiski

    drandiiski Maha Guru

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    Ahh yes. All those plasma TVs I’m talking about were advertised as 600Hz. Come to think of it, when in cinema/movie mode the input lag was phenomenal. I moved my mouse and it moved on the screen a good 1sec later. It was still present in Gaming mode, but just less.
     
  6. Smooth Operator

    Smooth Operator Guest

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    Not true, it's not recommended to have any static images in the first few hundred hours to let the phosphors lose some of their energy, I game on a plasma and have had things up for 8hrs without any burn-in issues.

    Your second point you are completely wrong, any AV enthusiast will tell you that LCD's have terrible motion resolution partly caused by the sample and hold method of displaying images which causes the persistence of an image in our brain to perceive the motion as blurring but also because the pixel response of the LCD technology is terrible. When you see monitors with response times of 3ms etc. those aren't input lag numbers those are pixel response times for a pixel to go from black to white to black again, though usually they do grey to white to grey to make them look better, plasmas and OLED by comparison have a pixel response time of 0.001ms.

    Your last statement is also not true, plasmas by Panasonic as an example always distinguish between what is their actual refresh rate (100Hz in UK, 120Hz in US.) and the subfield drive which started at 480Hz then when they started advertising it to compete with LCDs stupid marketing they were at 600Hz, their final plasmas used a focused field drive which was 3000Hz but you didn't see them market that like LCDs would.

    LCDs refresh rate numbers are also total BS, up until 3D most LCDs advertised as 120Hz were in fact only 60Hz with something called backlight scanning which flashes the backlight twice within the 60Hz signal which they then claim is 120Hz, there is no such thing as a 240Hz TV it's just a 120Hz screen with backlight scanning and a 480Hz LCD as you can imagine just flashes 4 times within a 120Hz output. So well done on showing you will believe any marketing that suits you and your bias towards LCD :giggle2:.

    As I said to Frances you can blame that on LCD manufacturers claiming total BS capabilities like 1,000,000:1 contrast ratios when they can barely muster 1,000:1, plasmas don't even need frame insertion techniques they added them to match the spec sheet of LCD's. The last plasmas had a natural motion resolution of 1080 lines meaning during motion they were still resolving at 1080p, LCDs on the other hand without the frame insertion/motion processing only have a motion resolution of 300 lines meaning during motion they show less detail than our old 480i/p CRTs! That is what people talk about when they are saying LCDs are blurry during motion.

    Plasmas also historically had the best input lag times in the region of 20-40ms compared with the average LCD of 60ms+ so you are wrong again there, I don't know what model you had or how you set it up but you clearly didn't do a very good job of it.

    I will give you though that the pre 2013 in bright rooms plasmas really washed out but they improved that with Samsungs last plasma the F8500 and Panasonics 50 series with a better screen filter but if you mainly watch in those conditions an LCD was always king because of their huge brightness advantage even the impressive Samsung couldn't compete and in bright conditions it also hides their poor screen uniformity and weak black levels.

    Oh and the flickering issue you say you see, some people can indeed see flickering on plasmas especially with brighter content, it's just like some people see rainbows on DLP, or the phosphor trails on plasma, you can either see it or you can't.

    Anyway I'm just hoping OLED gets cheap soon because I will not downgrade picture quality to an LCD but the phosphor trails around bright objects on my plasma is really starting to piss me off, LCDs might blur but the image break-up is nearly as bad to me.
     
  7. drandiiski

    drandiiski Maha Guru

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    Smooth. Thanks for the detailed info.

    About input lag on that particular model that I used though – it was there big time! As I said the conditions were 1:1 when testing it with my LCD and just moving the mouse on windows desktop was like telling someone where you want the mouse and waiting for him to move it. The lag was that huge. It may be because of post processing I don’t know, but it was far from ideal for gaming even in game mode. So response times may be lower, but there is something else in play here.

    The other thing is about flickering. I’m not sure how some people can see it and some can’t. I see it very clearly. It is quite easy to show to other people when you just open a white window or put a bright scene on pause and don’t look directly into the screen, but a bit next to it. You can see the screen literally shacking in you peripheral vision. What I’m sure is that somehow only people that already have the plasma can’t see it. Coincidence?
     
  8. Smooth Operator

    Smooth Operator Guest

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    |If you had the frame insertion on by accident even in game mode it puts the input lag up into the 100ms + range which obviously is unplayable.

    I could see it slightly on my plasma when it was new because the phosphors have more energy but once it bedded in I couldn't see it anymore, I also briefly upgraded to a VT30 a few years back and could see it slightly on that too when new.

    I think it just depends on what your eyes are sensitive to because I can't stand the blurring on LCDs when gaming, to me it looks like the whole screen is smearing/lagging during motion but most people don't even notice it or they just don't care enough to worry about picture quality issues.
     
  9. gx-x

    gx-x Ancient Guru

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    I don't know a single person that can't see plasma flickering. Some see it worse than others. On some plasma TVs I could even hear a high pitch squealing (probably because of bazzilion HZ at which plasma is fired). All in all - nice picture quality but a lot of drawbacks.
     
  10. drandiiski

    drandiiski Maha Guru

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    OK then. I’m sure you can’t have the frame insertion in gaming mode, because it is grayed out. Still there was lag. But whatever.

    Now things we can all agree:

    1. All those marketing numbers are bull**** and are really hurting the end user, because you need an AV guru or lots and lots of reading to make any informed decision.
    2. Plasmas look better in motion, but worse in well-lit rooms.
    3. Plasmas have flicker and LCD have blur, but it varies from person to person if they notice it. (I can notice both, but blur doesn’t make me sick as flicker)
    4. We did not mention it here but still – plasmas have much higher power consumption and heat output.
     

  11. Smooth Operator

    Smooth Operator Guest

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    Well there are far more negatives than that on both sides but since plasma is dead it's not really relevant anymore ;).

    Just hope for the sake of picture quality that OLED kills LCD for good because the only reason it has thrived is because it is cheap and easy to manufacture, the actual display technology is terrible, every addition like frame insertion, backlight dimming etc. was created to try and help it's undefeatable native issues.

    Literally the only way to actually fix it is to do what Sony did with a prototype a few years ago called Crystal LED which was effectively an actual LED TV with each pixel being an individual LED, now that would be an amazing TV. Instead they give us cheap crap which they call an LED which is actually just an LCD with an LED backlight instead of bulb like older LCDs which is why they can now use dynamic dimming but the edge-lit versions are actually much worse for screen uniformity.
     
  12. drandiiski

    drandiiski Maha Guru

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    Yes, these are just a few things I mentioned that we can all agree on, without arguing more. And yes OLED, real LED or even laser displays will probably be much better, but will we be still around to enjoy them – I don’t know.
     
  13. Madhatstand

    Madhatstand Active Member

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    Any nasty flickering was probably due to the resolution being 1080i not 1080p (i being interlaced). Quite a few older plasmas could only do 1080i so flickering was common if the screen was not set to it's native res...

    We have an old 50" plasma in the front room - picture quality is great and it's nice and sharp with no motion blur, but when playing games through it for long periods of time you'll still get a little bit of burn in, but it soon disappears - racing games are the worst culprit as large speedo's have a tendency to stick around after the action's finished lol!
     
  14. drandiiski

    drandiiski Maha Guru

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    It was 1080P for sure. And about the burn-in – I had tried to make it happen on purpose, but it did had any noticeable one. At least I can give it that.
     
  15. Smooth Operator

    Smooth Operator Guest

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    I'm sure we will, the main impending issue for OLED besides yield issues is the other TV manufacturers pushing for HDR for the 4K standard which requires a TV to be able to hit 500nits minimum of brightness and 1000nits recommended which for a phosphor based display is virtually impossible due to the issues it would cause pushing them that hard. Personally I'd rather have the perfect blacks of OLED which gives much better contrast than more detail/brighter whites so I hope it doesn't kill OLED before it even gets started.

    I'm considering just shunning TV's completely and the Epson LS10000 projector has caught my eye with it's laser light source.
     

  16. Lowki

    Lowki Master Guru

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    I've been looking at the oled tech aswell. I will be happy if as long as the pixel response is on par with crt wor plasma. For me I will not be going back to LCD ever again. It's terrible for fps shooters I'm guessing that's why most games have a motion blur setting these days just to hide the LCD deficiency. I'm also really surprised that lcds don't get thrashed by the gaming media for there massive motion blur artifacts. Then again it's possible not everyone has as keen of an eye for these things as me.
     
  17. anxious_f0x

    anxious_f0x Ancient Guru

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    Same here, had mine about 2 years now, love it.
     
  18. Smooth Operator

    Smooth Operator Guest

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    It does have the same pixel response time as plasma so it has the potential to be just as fast, the problem at the moment is they are using the same sample and hold technique as LCDs so whilst you don't get the smearing like on LCDs you still see motion blur due to the image persistence of the human brain.

    If you drive it the same way as plasma however with pulse width modulation then you get the same motion artefacts that plasmas have with high contrast motion which is what bothers me the most about my plasma.
     
  19. gx-x

    gx-x Ancient Guru

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    everyone is upset about motion blur yet I bet half of you don't even turn it off in games and on consoles you often don't even get the choice. A tad hypocritical if you ask me.


    OLEDs will be fine once they actually make them work properly and we don't have stuck LEDs everywhere. Also, they need to come down with price, like, really come down. 32" 1080p @ 400 euros and not a euro more. Then I'm game.
     
  20. EspHack

    EspHack Ancient Guru

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    well im my experience im done with hdtvs, I had a plasma 720p before I even wanted one and I felt it was ok, I liked the weird artifacts when it was almost all black, my lumia 928 does the same while in "glance screen" it makes me think im seeing things sometimes, then it died and couldn't fix it or find a replacement, they are dead after all...then tried a flashy LCD with led backlight whatever, it was like an open window in my room with the sun shining directly, seriously, whats the point? everything looked grayish and blown out of proportion, I adjusted the brightness to the lesser bad settings, and still had grey blacks, motion blur was only evident in games and sometimes I even liked it, but after a week or so I just couldn't stand it anymore, wanted OLED which is the closest thing to plasma but well... prices are a real problem there, then someone jokingly advised me to try a projector, in my view all projectors were crap for business meetings and washed out squared images, then read some reviews and started digging and finally bought one, after installing it I was blown away, it could be as bright or brighter than the LCD, but keeping the real blacks, and no flicker and/or blur, hell its even 144hz natively, plus I now have this huge 90" display, I could see things I didn't see before, not pixelated but just the right size-resolution ratio I guess

    anyway I think it all depends on your liking, if you have a bright living room I recommend LCD, if you have a dark dungeon then plasma it is, or OLED if it ever comes down in price, for a middle ground I suggest you take a look at projectors, also I don't really watch "tv" on it, I see them as big main monitors for relaxing on my bed, and that's why until I can buy a 50-60" "monitor" from dell or hp im never going to buy a tv again, its really frustrating seeing how they waste resources in wifi, smart ****, apps, useless speakers and more crap instead of focusing on delivering the best image possible within the budget, to think they are shipping 4k tvs without a proper connection to push the content is just unacceptable
     

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