TV sales by type

[Kooldino]

Yeah, Plasma has a far superior contrast ratio (due to good blacks) than LCD, along with excellent viewing angle, which LCD isn't very good at.

Gotta argue with that point. The LCDs I see in the store have damn near 180* viewing angles.

One thing I don't like about LCDs (or maybe this is with HDTVs in general?):

Watching SDTV on an LCD HDTV looks worse than it does on m SDTV. Is this the case with plasma as well?

[GT98]

Watching SDTV on an LCD HDTV looks worse than it does on m SDTV. Is this the case with plasma as well?

Yes, since the SDTV resoultion is only 300-400 Lines, where HDTV starts at 480. its just like looking at 640x480 scaled up to fit a 20in LCD on a computer...

[rylan]

Yeah, depends on the scalar chip, but generally that'll look bad on any HDTV.

[rylan]

The CCFLs in LCDs are good for 40k-50k hours to 50% of original brightness.
Its an exponential type curve, where the biggest brightness drop is in the first 5-10k hours... so the display can lose 20-25% of its brightness in that time.

[rylan]

Yup... well it used to be that plasmas were 20-30k hours to half brightness. Plasmas are now 40-50k hour to half-brightness, while most LCDs are now 50k and up.

Lots of it is turning into marketing specmanship now between the manufacturers. If your tv gets used 8 hour/day every day of the year, thats about 3000 hours per year. Even after 10 years at that use rate, both a plasma and lcd tv will be substantially brighter than a 10 year old CRT based TV.

[Dr Mordrid]

The life of the blue organic material is still far from sufficient. If those sets come out, they will cost a LOT (much like Plasma did when it first came out) and have numerous issues (again like Plasma did in its early stage).

Blue OLED lifetimes hit 400,000 hours @100cd/m²; 25,000 hours @400cd/m²

Long enough for you?

Our LCD's rarely get set to over 20% (most often 0%) on their brightness scales so.....

[Mehen]

Thats pushing 50 years of straight running. Yikes.

Some specs on SED if anyone is interested.

From wiki:
Exceptional 50,000:1 contrast ratio (dark room only). According to IGN at the 2006 CES show Toshiba's final versions of SEDs will ship with a contrast ratio of 100,000:1.
Exceptional 1ms response time.
Brightness of 450 cd/m2.[3].
180 degree viewing angle.

[Dr Mordrid]

I'd be watching SED more closely than OLED for tvs, assuming they can also get SED yields up for mass production.

Toshiba's president says OLED is the successor to SED

Granted he also says they don't plan on using OLED until 2015 +/-, but on reading a bit deeper it sounds like this is because they have so much invested in SED than anything else. As such their position may change if the market leapfrogs them and their timetable, which is very possible. Other companies aren't so conservative in their OLED timetables

@|Mehen|

Samsungs OLED response time is now less than 0.01ms.

Chi Mei EL Corporation (CMEL)/Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO), sold here as Westinghouse, have a 25" OLED TV in testing now.

[Mehen]

What impresses me from those specs is the contrast ratio, makes LCDs seem like a joke.

[rylan]

25K hours at 400cd on blue OLEDs isn't acceptable for commercialization into tvs etc. For small devices, that'll be fine since they don't run bright anyway and people won't care if there is color shift from the blues dimming before the red and green... and thats where oled will be targeted first, such as cell phones and portable media devices + laptops due to the substantial power savings over lcd.

Yup, contrast ratio for SEC and OLED will be great, since they are a light generating source and not dependant upon blocking light such as in an LCD array.

I'll be at CES and looking at some of the SED and OLED displays so I'll give an update if I see anything new.