LCD or Plasma

Tom_Jones

Ok folks I'm quite technically niave can someone tell me the differences between LCD and Plasma ?, which are more reliable ? and do I need to buy special scart leads as Currys say I do ?

I'm looking to purchase a decent quality HD ready TV between 37 and 42 inches and a budget of around £1500 - £1700 anyone got some recommendations ?

Many Thanks

TJ

Xio_2

LCD:
LCD technology is based on two charged panels sandwiching a layer of liquid crystal (hence the name Liquid Crystal Display). Voltage is applied to the crystals turning them either light or dark coloured and a backlight is used to illuminate the resulting image.

LCD screens are known to have generally excellent colour reproduction and produce crystal clear images at their native resolution. They are, for the most part, reliable and don't suffer from screen burn as older CRT monitors used to. Disadvantages include things like low contrast ratios in comparison to plasma screens and you often hear stories about dead pixels on LCD's.

Plasma
Plasma technology involves the use of gases between layers of glass to create pixels. A voltage is applied to each pixel to excite the gases and produce colours and light.

Plasma screens have excellent picture quality at output and very high contrast ratios. As a result you can achieve near perfect picture reproduction with very, very large screen sizes. But here come the disadvantages: they weigh a lot compared to LCD and need some really strong brackets if you want to wall mount them. The screens use more power compared to LCD's and because gas is used in the screen itself, it eventually grows 'weak' and the picture will begin to fade (we are talking a time scale of several years here). You can get plasma screens refilled/gas renewed but it's quite a specialist job.

Connections
This will apply to both LCD and Plasma. The large screens often have a HUGE number of connections on them ranging from standard VGA monitor inputs, DVI monitor inputs, HDMI inputs on full HD ready sets, SCART, composite and S-Video. Many will also have a component output for video and audio will be RCA based or SPDIF for digital signals. The cables you need will depend on what you want to connect to the screen really.

Hope thats of some help

Astaroth

Look at the Panasonic 60 for your budget (their website will have the rest of the letters in the model number )

You do not need a specialist scart cable but 1) depending on your source there are certainly better connections available than scart 2) if scart is the best connection available you should make sure you have either an RGB Scart cable or a fully wired (I prefer option 2) rather than a cheapo cable that is probably only wired for composite image (scart is only a connection type not a signal type and can carry several different types of signal like RGB, s.video, composite etc)