Compared to LCD-TVs, plasma still offers better picture quality at lower cost. (At 42 inches, that may be equal cost.) Yet, plasma TV makers have failed to keep the buying public excited. As a result, although plasma unit sales continue to rise, they are rising much more slowly than are LCD sales, and plasma’s market share is falling sharply.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

There are reasons for this, of course. Full high definition (FHD) - 1080 lines - has been more widely available in LCD-TVs than in plasma, and although that doesn’t matter in your living room with screens of 50 inches or less, it matters a lot on the showroom floor. Plasma TVs are also heavier than LCD-TVs of the same screen size, although the extent to which that enters into consumers’ buying decisions is not clear. And some people are still concerned about image burn-in, which has not been a legitimate problem for plasma TVs for years.

But the major plasma makers are very far from throwing in the towel. Early this week, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which sells its consumer electronics products under the Panasonic brand and is the world’s leading maker of plasma TVs, announced it would be adding two new plasma TV series to its Viera line effective September 1. The two new series are the top-of-the-line PZ750 series and the more affordable PZ70 series. Not only does this double the number of series under the Viera label, but all of the new models are FHD.

Shiro Nishiguchi, director of the corporate marketing division for the Panasonic brand in Japan, said the new product introduction is "aimed at expanding the product lineup and meeting diversifying consumer needs." You could say that about any product introduction, but what seems significant here is that Matsushita is moving toward offering FHD as a standard feature, which should help it compete with LCDs. And multiplying the number of models should help Panasonic (and plasma) get more floor space in retailers’ showrooms.

At the International Meeting on Information Display (IMID), being held this week in Daegu, Korea, Samsung SDI announced it would begin volume production of the world’s first single-scan Full HD PDP (a 50-inch model) next month. Conventional PDPs address their pixels with driver ICs mounted at both the top and bottom of the panel, with half of each column addressed from each end. Single-scan puts all of the driver ICs on one end and has a driver address an entire column. Single-scan can reduce driver cost by 30%.

Single-scan technology has become common in HD panels (768 lines) over the last two or three years, but the greater number of rows to be addressed in a FHD panel has made the technique much harder to implement there. So this is a significant technical achievement that should lead to meaningful cost reductions in manufacturing FHD plasma panels.

Samsung SDI didn’t stop there, though. Also at IMID, the company announced it had succeeded in reducing the overall thickness of a plasma panel by over 2mm by using 1.8mm-thick, high-strength PDP glass instead of the conventional 3mm glass. This reduces the weight of a 50-inch PDP module by more than 6.6kg, Samsung SDI said.

So at least two of plasma’s key players are seriously addressing technical and cost issues. Will that be enough? No. Not by itself. Plasma needs to become exciting again. And for that, the technology needs a brilliant marketer and a compelling spokesperson. There is a coalition of plasma manufacturers, but it has not taken this on as its mission. It should - before it’s too late.

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