In the past several years, LCD has gained larger market share than plasma. plasma TVs was once considered the future of televison, but now it seems they have lost their shine. To regain plasma's lost ground in the HD TV market, plasma manufacturers are looking at ways to enhance plasma's quality and lower its price.
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"Performance will be going up in both (plasma and LCD), but costs will be coming down faster in plasma," according to Ross Young, president of market research firm displaySearch.
That's good news for consumers. One of the biggest challenges in getting people to switch to high-definition TVs is the price. Predictably, as prices have fallen in the last year, more consumers are willing to buy into the idea of the HD experience. About 1 million plasma and 5.2 million LCD TV sets were sold in the U.S. last year, compared to about 750,000 plasma and 2.6 million LCD the year before that, according to retail tracking data collected by The NPD Group.
LCD is so far the undisputed champion of the HDTV popularity contest, and much of it has to do with price and manufacturers' ability to scale the technology to increasingly larger screen sizes. But plasma manufacturers have gradually found ways to produce their displays for less too. The average price of an LCD dropped from $989 last year to $932 this year, while plasma's average price fell from $2,480 to $1,664.
Besides lower price, one of the traditional benefits of LCD over plasma is the brightness of the picture in a well-lighted environment. And though all TVs can be energy hogs, plasma sets are notorious for their high power consumption.
Many believe the key to solving all three issues for plasma is something called luminous efficiency, or the ratio of the light output compared with the power input. Currently, the best plasma TVs are capable of 2 to 2.5 lumens per watt. For comparison's sake, the average fluorescent light bulb can output 80 lumens per watt.
