Are you being faced with the dilemma of choosing between
a Plasma TV and an LCD Television?

Plasma vs LCD TV - a Comparative Guide

Plasma vs LCD TV - surely a much-debated issue and often a dilemma faced by many when buying a flat-panel television.  In this comparative guide, we discuss the pros and cons of both Plasma televisions and LCD HDTVs. This should help you better determine where either of these flat-panel display technologies fit best.

 Which is better:
A Plasma Television or an LCD TV?

Are you planning a flat-panel TV purchase? Surely, there is a lot in favor of flat panel televisions.

Flat-panel TV display technology represents one of the biggest television technological achievements ever since the invention of color television in the 50's.

Whether it is a plasma television or an LCD TV, a flat-panel television is slim - typically less than 4 inches deep - and represents an attractive addition to any room.

What's more, you can literally hang a plasma or LCD HDTV on the wall, on the ceiling, or in that case, anywhere else you feel like watching your new television.

The problem many face when it comes to selecting a flat-panel display is whether to opt for a plasma television or an LCD TV.

This is a rather difficult and complicated comparison between two competing technologies. Not only plasma and LCD television sets come in similar slim-style packages, both are also capable of similar picture performance, with bright, colorful, crystal-clear pictures.

To complicate this plasma vs LCD TV selection process further, price and size - two major considerations up the recent past - are becoming less of an issue. LCD televisions are now coming out bigger and at prices that are starting to seriously compete with those of similar-size plasma TVs.

Despite all these similarities, plasma and LCD displays process the image in a completely different manner. More specifically, there is no relation what-so-ever between the technologies driving these displays.

Plasma displays use a matrix of tiny gas plasma cells that are charged by precise electrical voltages to emit light and create the picture image. In other words, each picture element in a plasma TV display acts as a miniature light source.

Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) panels - work by trapping a liquid crystal solution between two sheets of polarized glass. When an electric current passes through the liquid crystals, the crystals rotate causing a change in the polarization of the light passing through them in response to the applied voltage. This results in more or less light passing through the polarized glass to reach the face of the display. LCD panels do not generate light - rather they filter or subtract light produced by a backlight source to create the image on the panel surface.

It is not the scope of this plasma vs LCD comparative guide to go into the details of how these different display technologies work. After all, what matters in the end is not what is going behind the screen; more important is how these different display technologies perform as a television screen.

At the same time, one cannot but keep in mind that these same differences give each display technology its strengths and weaknesses, and therefore render one more suitable than the other under a different environment.