It’s an old advertising principle: Sell the sizzle, not the steak. Unfortunately for plasma, it’s sizzle is all but gone.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

It wasn’t always that way. Not long ago, having a plasma TV was the height of cool. "Plasma" so defined large-screen, flat TV, that when large LCD-TVs first came on the scene, many people called them "plasmas" too.

Now the situation is reversed. Our friends at Vizio, who sell both LCD and plasma-TVs, say that a 42-inch plasma has to be $200 less than an equivalent LCD-TV before they can sell it.

This is frustrating (to those of us who care about such things) because the plasma steak has never been better. And both the great steak and the lousy sizzle were easy to see at the recent SID show in Long Beach.

First the sizzle, or lack thereof. Of all the exhibitors at SID, only one was showing plasma displays.

Now for the steak. That one exhibitor, Samsung SDI, was showing its new W2A panel architecture, which features false contour reduction for reduced motion blur and reduced color-band error for improved contour clarity. If you live in PAL territory, W2A converts the frame rate from 50 to 75Hz for reduced flicker and double edges. And, even better, the panel has 16-bit color - that is, it can reproduce 281 trillion different colors. Luminance is 1300 nits and contrast ratio is 10,000:1. Compared to the already very good W1 panel, the W2A is distinctly and impressively superior.

Better yet, the price of W2A-based 42-inch TVs will be only $1250 when they appear in the stores late this year, according to In-Cha Hwang, Samsung SDI’s assistant manager of corporate PR.

This TV produces beautiful and impressive images, and it shouldn’t matter to anybody that these 42- and 50-inch panels are "only" 1366×768. The combination of great color depth and very high contrast give an impression of sharpness and depth that will convince most people they are looking at a "Full HD" screen. There’s much more to say about our foolish over-emphasis on FHD, but that’s for another time.

For now, get a look at a W2A-based plasma TV when you can. The sizzle may be gone, but you probably won’t care when you bite into the steak.