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Plasma displays are bright (1000 lx or higher for the module), have a wide color gamut, and can be produced in fairly large sizes, up to 260 cm (102 inches) diagonally. They have a very high "dark-room" contrast, creating the "perfect black" desirable for watching movies. The display panel is only 6 cm (2 1/2 inches) thick, while the total thickness, including electronics, is less than 10 cm (4 inches). Plasma displays use as much power per square meter as a CRT or an AMLCD television; in 2004 the cost has come down to US$1900 or less for the popular 42 inch (107 cm) diagonal size, making it very attractive for home-theatre use. Real life measurements of plasma power consumption find it to be much less than that normally quoted by manufacturers. Nominal measuments indicate 150 Watts for a 50" screen. The lifetime of the latest generation of PDPs is estimated at 60,000 hours to half life when displaying video. Half life is the point where the picture has degraded to half of its original brightness, which is considered the end of the functional life of the display. So if you use it at an average of 2-1/2 hours a day, the PDP will last approximately 65 years. History During the 1970s and early 1980s, LCD technology was not yet mature. However, during the early 80's timeframe, a tabletop video game called Popeye was made with a color LCD, a device with technology ahead of it's time. Technologies used for portable devices made prior to the 1990s to use color graphics include tabletop video games that use Vacuum fluorescent displays and also, before modern laptop computers that used color graphics, the so-called luggable computer, Commodore SX-64 used color graphics on a mini-CRT. The Commodore SX-64 was however bulky hence the aforementioned term luggable. Functional details Contrast ratio claims Contrast ratio indicates the difference between the brightest part of a picture and the darkest part of a picture, measured in discrete steps, at any given moment. The implication is that a higher contrast ratio means more picture detail. Contrast ratios for plasma displays are often advertised as high as 5000:1. On the surface, this is a great thing. In reality, there are no standardized tests for contrast ratio, meaning each manufacturer can publish virtually any number that they like. To illustrate, some manufacturers will measure contrast with the front glass removed, which accounts for some of the wild claims regarding their advertised ratios. For reference, the page you're reading now (on a computer monitor) is actually about 50:1. A printed page is about 80:1. A really good print at a movie theater will be about 500:1 Vertical Alignment displays are a form of LC displays in which the liquid crystal material naturally exists in a horizontal state removing the need for extra transistors (as in IPS). When no voltage is applied the liquid crystal cell, it remains perpendicular to the substrate creating a black display. When voltage is applied, the liquid crystal cells shift to a horizontal position, parallel to the substrate, allowing light to pass through and create a white display. VA liquid crystal displays provide some of the same advantages as IPS panels, particularly an improved viewing angle and improved black level.
The TN+Film (Twisted Nematic) display is the most common consumer display type, due to its lower price. The pixel response time on modern TN panels is sufficiently fast to avoid the shadow-trail artifacts that were a cause for complaint in the past. This fast response time has been a heavily marketed aspect of TN displays, although in most cases this number does not reflect performance across the entire range of possible color transitions. However this marketing strategy, combined with the relatively lower cost of production for TN panels, has led to the dominance of TN in the consumer market. Twisted Nematic displays contain liquid crystal elements which twist and untwist at varying degrees to allow light to pass through. When no voltage is applied to a TN liquid crystal cell, the light is polarized to pass through the cell. In proportion to the voltage applied, the LC cells twist up to 90 degrees changing the polarization and blocking the light's path. By properly adjusting the level of the voltage most any grey level or transmission can be achieved. Functional details LCDs can be either transmissive or reflective, depending on the location of the light source. A transmissive LCD is illuminated from the back by a backlight and viewed from the opposite side (front). This type of LCD is used in applications requiring high luminance levels such as computer displays, televisions, personal digital assistants, and mobile phones. The illumination device used to illuminate the LCD in such a product usually consumes much more power than the LCD itself. With prices starting around US$2,000 and going all the way up past US$20,000 (as of 2004), these sets did not sell as quickly as older technologies like CRT. But as prices fall and technology advances, they have started to seriously compete against the CRT sets. Some 42" sets fell below $1,500 at major retailers like Best Buy and Costco during the 2005 Christmas season, and many of the retailers reported that plasma TVs were among the hottest selling items for that season.
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Normal Liquid Crystal Displays like those found in calculators have direct driven image elements – a voltage can be applied across one segment without interfering with other segments of the display. This is impractical for a large display with a large number of pixels since it would require millions of connections - top and bottom connections for each of red, green and blue of every pixel. To avoid this issue, the pixels are addressed in rows and columns which reduce the connection count from millions to thousands. If all the pixels in one row are driven with a positive voltage and all the pixels in one column are driven with a negative voltage, then the pixel at the intersection has the largest applied voltage and is switched. The problem with this solution is that all the pixels in the same column see a fraction of the applied voltage as do all the pixels in the same row, so although they are not switched completely, they do tend to darken. The solution to the problem is to supply each pixel with its own transistor switch which allows each pixel to be individually controlled. The low leakage current of the transistor also means that the voltage applied to the pixel does not leak away between refreshes to the display image. Each pixel is a small capacitor with a transparent ITO layer at the front, a transparent layer at the back and a layer of insulating liquid crystal between. Pioneering work on liquid crystals was undertaken in the late 1960s by the UK's Radar Research Establishment at Malvern. The team at RRE supported ongoing work by George Gray and his team at the University of Hull who ultimately discovered the cyanobiphenyl liquid crystals (which had all of the correct stability and temperature properties for application in LCDs). The xenon and neon gas in a plasma television is contained in hundreds of thousands of tiny cells positioned between two plates of glass. Long electrodes are also sandwiched between the glass plates, on both sides of the cells. The address electrodes sit behind the cells, along the rear glass plate. The transparent display electrodes, which are surrounded by an insulating dielectric material and covered by a magnesium oxide protective layer, are mounted above the cell, along the front glass plate. Until quite recently (c. 2004) the superior brightness and viewing angle of color plasma panels, when compared to LCD, made them one of the most popular forms of display for HDTV. However since that time improvements in LCD technology have closed the gap dramatically. The much lower weight, price and power consumption of LCDs have seen them make large inroads into the former plasma market. Sony now only sell a very limited range of Plasma screens and appear set to quit this market altogether.
The zenithal bistable device (ZBD), developed by QinetiQ (formerly DERA), can retain an image without power. The crystals may exist in one of two stable orientations (Black and "White") and power is only required to change the image. ZBD Displays is a spin-off company from QinetiQ who manufacture both grayscale and colour ZBD devices. A French company, Nemoptic, has developed another zero-power, paper-like LCD technology which has been mass-produced in Taiwan since July 2003. This technology is intended for use in low-power mobile applications such as e-books and wearable computers. Zero-power LCDs are in competition with electronic paper. Active matrix technologies Value TFT screens and most 38 cm (~15 in.) sized LCDs usually fail to include a digital signal compatible DVI interface, thus their future proofing may be limited. The upper end of 43 cm (~17 in.) or 48 cm (~19 in.) gamer and office TFT screens may have dual analog-VGA and DVI sockets; almost all professional screens have DVI and pivot mode for letter-mode display. However, the use of a DVI video signal does not automatically guarantee better image quality: a good video card RAMDAC and properly shielded analogue VGA cable may produce a better display than a bad video card and DVI. 1904: Otto Lehmann publishes his major work "Liquid Crystals"