Plasma TV’s impressive attributes have made it easy for many consumers to choose it over the growing LCD-TV competition, but, as seen at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, LCD is narrowing the gap.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer

One such area is LCD’s blurring of rapidly moving objects such as airborne footballs and attacking aliens. With recent increases in LCD response time through faster cell architectures and response-time compensation, blurring is now at a level that many consumers find acceptable. Innovations such as blinking backlights, black- or gray-field insertion (GFI), and data rate doubling - some of which will begin appearing in mainstream TV sets later this year - are likely to solve the problem for all but the most demanding viewing. BenQ, for one, was promising GFI by the end of the year thanks panel-supplier AUO.

Plasma has also had a significant advantage in the range of colors it can display, with a color gamut of about 92% compared to LCD’s 72%. But a variety of technologies - including cold-cathode fluorescent tubes (CCFTs) for backlights with reformulated phosphor coatings, LED backlights, and multi-primary approaches - allow LCD to match or exceed plasma’s gamut. Expect to see such technologies in a growing number of premium LCD-TVs toward the end of this year.

LCDs have also been catching up to plasma in price in the 37- and 42-inch sizes, but - depending on which projections you choose to believe - plasma may well hold on to its price advantage at sizes larger than 42 inches, even as consumer prices for both technologies continue to drop.

Plasma may even improve its cost-competitiveness at the 42-inch level. Matsushita and partner Toray Industries are putting $1.6B dollars into a fourth plasma display manufacturing plant to be built in Amagasaki, the companies announced today. That’s a lot for a plasma facility, and it buys a lot of capacity: 6M 42-inch panels per year. The plant is slated to begin production in July 2007.

Matsushita expects the global plasma display market to be 25M units a year in 2010, and the company plans to have 40% of it. That’s the kind of investment that could drive plasma prices down faster than LCD prices. Previously, an executive at LG Electronics predicted that plasma costs would drop 55% from the end of 2005 to the end of 2007, while LCD costs would drop only 35%.

Correction: In the January 6th edition of Insight’s Daily Outlook, we incorrectly identified the supplier of the LEDs for the LED-based microdisplay RPTVs. In fact, the LEDs for all five LED-based MDTVs shown at CES were from one supplier - Luminus. We will a have a full report on this, plus LCDs and PDPs in the next editions of Display Watch and Projection Monthly.