As I mentioned briefly in last Thursday’s Display Daily, with the establishment of LG Electronics’ plasma business as a separate unit, an attack dog had been unleashed at FPD International. More deserves to be said about that.

LGE was not only one making a case for the superiority of its new G Platform over its competitors’ plasma-panel offerings. It was also making the case that plasma is superior to LCD-TV. To take one line from a poster in the extensive LGE booth, "PDP is the Best Display Device."

The G Platform uses revised phosphors, a colored dielectric, a new cell structure and enhanced electronics to deliver a contrast ratio of 30,000:1 (compared to "only" 15,000:1 for conventional PDPs), a color gamut of 115% NTSC (compared to 92% or so for conventional PDPs), no video noise (that’s what they said), and no double edges. We shouldn’t ignore the 16 bit/channel color depth, which delivers 281.5 trillion colors. Peak luminance for most of the new FHD panels is 1000 nits; 1500 nits for most of the HD panels. Luminous efficiency is also up, to 2.2 lm/W. LGE claims over 900 lines of moving picture resolution on their FHD panels and 720 lines on their HD panels. A variety of side-by-side comparisons showed the superiority of the new platform.

LG also showed its newly introduced 32-inch HD PDP, which will be available first in the Brazilian market. The designation "HD" needs to be accompanied by an asterisk for this panel: The pixel format is 1024×720, not the 1280×720 that would provide a 16:9 image without rescaling. And the 32-inch delivers "only" 1000 nits instead of the 1500 LG gets from its larger HD PDPs. LG has been promoting this panel as the world’s first 32-inch HD PDP. It is, with no excuses, a very good-looking panel, in part because it shares the 16-bit/channel color depth with its larger siblings.

Finally, in a dimmed room, there was a PDP-LCD comparison, with rows of H’s scanning across a 50-inch PDP screen and 52-inch LCD screen at different rates measured in pixels per second. In this test, there was no question that motion blur was markedly less at 4, 8, and 16 pixels per second on the 60Hz-refresh PDP than on the 120Hz-refresh LCD. Maybe that’s why several LCD makers on the show floor were showing techniques that went beyond just 120Hz for controlling motion blur.

It’s well known that the bright ambient at many electronic retailers favors LCD over plasma. LG put some numbers to that observation. According to LG, PDP provides the best image up to 200 lux, and the ambient at many retailers is about 1000 lux.

With hints that Panasonic may be joining LGE in its more aggressive marketing stand, perhaps plasma will be able to regain some of the market share - not to mention the general "buzz" - it has lost to LCD-TV over the last couple of years.

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