Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Panasonic's 1080p 42" Plasma -- Should You Care?

Matsushita, parent company of Panasonic, will intro the world's first 42-inch 1080p plasma display in Japan on April 27th. U.S. pricing will be around $2,500 when it hits our store shelves in June -- a steep $900 premium over the company's newest 1024 x 768 model that debuted last month. More from Reuters.

I really don't see a ton of significance with the 42" 1080p PDP -- for the same money you can get a pretty nice 50" 1366 x 768 plasma and I guarantee that you'll appreciate the extra 8 inches far more than the increased resolution. In fact, at CES this year I was in the Panasonic booth where they had 1080p images playing on both standard and 1080p plasmas. I could honestly only see a difference on 2 of the 10 or so images -- and the Panasonic guy I talked to told me he could really only see an improved picture on 3 of them.

So while 1080p has a lot of buzz these days and Matsushita undoubtedly felt pressured to produce a sub-50" 1080p plasma display to compete with LCD makers like Sony and Sharp, it's hard for me to advise people that 1080p is worth the price premium right now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You dont want plasma screens because the gas that is used in those screens reduces in volume over about 5 years which means your tv is dead after 5 years. Buy LCD only as they last for ages.

Anonymous said...

Yeah the first comment is completely
idiotic. Plasmas have 60,000 hours
before they reduce to half as bright.

Do the math, at 6 hours of viewing per day, it would take 27 years for plasmas to get to half brightness.

5 years...uh no, more like my plasma has the potential to survive close to 50 years. It will still be around long after I'm dead.