plasma or lcd tv

InsideInsurance

What do you mean by "smart TV"? There are the samsung Smart TVs which suffer exactly the same problems as all other LED screens but have things like iPlayer built into them.

Plasma screens are better than LCD/ LED in almost all performance related considerations other than (1) brightness and (2) screen reflection. Outside of performance Plasma are heavier/ bulkier and use up more electricity.

If your able to create ideal viewing conditions then I would always get a plasma screen as they win hands down. If you have a sunny room or somewhere where the window may cause reflections on the screen etc then I'd probably go for LCD/ LED.

Because of having both problems I recently replaced my screen with an LED (samsung D7000 series) and after changing almost every setting the picture isnt too bad at all, though not as good as the Plasma (panasonic VT30) that I would have gotten if I didnt have the window where it is. Out the box the image was terrible looking (unless watching Pixar type films)

Hammyman

Bedroom - LCD/LED. Main TV, Plasma.

custardy

Hammyman wrote: »

Bedroom - LCD/LED. Main TV, Plasma.

thats my set up

OK_Sauce

Can you actually buy a 40" plasma now, is 42" now the smallest?

Anyway I'll third the two previous posts, plasma - main, LCD/LED secondary!

takeiteasy77

scotty1971 wrote: »

are the new smart tvs any good?

Whats one of those ?

spike7451

takeiteasy77 wrote: »

Whats one of those ?

It's basically a Plasma TV with built in internet so you can stream I Player,watch You Tube & surf the net without a PC being attatched to the TV.

AlwaysSomething

Plasma: Excellent reproduction of almost all colours. Able to change the picture very quickly without blur. Virtually no burn in these days. Higher power consumption. Heavier screens.
LCD: More difficulty in producing deep blacks. Higher maximum brightness if working in daylight, but still less of a range of colours and greys than plasma. Not able to change the image as quickly as plasma (whatever marketing claims the manufacturers may use to try to persuade you otherwise), so potential for blurring of the image, for example when watching sport, or other fast moving scenes.
LED refers to an LCD screen with LED backlighting. They used to use a fluorescent light at the edge of the screen. The pixels would turn clear to let the light out, or solid to display black. Since the pixels could be neither perfectly clear, nor perfectly solid, it was hard to display an image with both light and dark areas - the earlier mentioned problem of dynamic range (black-to-white range). By putting multiple small LED lights behind the screen, it is possible to dim the LED where the picture needs to be dark, and go full bright on the LED where the picture needs to be bright. Still not as good a solution as plasma though.
LCD screens (especially with LED backlights) can be thinner, lighter, and use less power.
In my opinion, the best plasma is clearly better than the best LCD/LED.
That's the screens. Remember also that half the end result is down to the processing. How does the set take the incoming signal and fit it to the screen. If you are mostly viewing Freeview, the set has to roughly double up the picture to make it fill all of the available pixels. How it does this can make a huge difference to how good the end result looks. Generally you get what you pay for. The more expensive sets have much better processing.
Now on to resolution. It's a game of diminishing returns. If you are sitting very close to the screen, you might be able to make out the individual dots that make up the picture. Once you get further away than this, it becomes of little or no importance whether your screen is 720 or 1080 lines. You may feel the need to get a 1080p TV so you can tell your neighbours you've got one, but if you do a controlled test - ask people to judge picture quality of multiple sets - the results do not depend on resolution.
You need to think about what you watch, and what you plan to watch in the next few years. Blu-Ray DVD, Xbox, and some files you can download to your computer can be 1080 lines. Other HD sources will be 720p. Freeview is 576 lines.
Progressive/Interlaced. That's the p or the i at the end of the 720p/1080i. A progressive picture is captured and displayed in a single image. Think of it as starting at the top left, and progressing to the bottom right. An interlaced image is more complicated. It is made up of two half-images. Imagine a 1080i image. Line 1 is drawn at the top of the screen. Then we skip a line, and draw line 3, then 5, and so on until we reach the bottom. Then we go back to the top and start again. We start with line 2, then 4, and so on until we reach the bottom. The two half-pictures make up one complete, high resolution image. If we are viewing a stationary or slow moving picture, this results in a high resolution, high quality picture. If, however, there is fast motion in the image, we could run into problems. In the time between the two half-frames, a football could move its position. So instead of a single, round football, you get two dimmer, less round footballs in two different locations. It all happens pretty quickly, but it does diminish the picture quality. So, if you are watching a nature program with huge wide panoramas, you might prefer to use 1080i. If you are watching sport, it might be better to go with 720p - you give up some (very fine) detail, in exchange for a faster refresh of the image. Why not 1080p you ask. Well, that's a lot of information to broadcast, and a lot for the TV electronics to swallow, so nobody is broadcasting 1080p yet.
How to choose. It's tricky. Just going into a shop isn't going to solve your problems. They normally have the brightness whacked up to maximum to make the sets stand out. That's not how you are going to watch it at home. It also makes the LCD's look better, as they can normally go brighter, and it hides their poor black reproduction. What you can learn in the shop is how good the processing is. Look for motion blur in fast moving scenes. Look closely and see how much changing is going on in what appears to be a static part of the screen. It almost looks like ants crawling on the screen to me. Be sure to look at some Freeview if you like to watch that - it's no good buying a set that plays a Disney animation beautifully, if it's terrible when fed with a standard definition source (some of them are).
Read up on the internet - AVSforum.com is very good.
Make a list of the sources you are going to connect to the TV, and make sure the set can handle all of those inputs.
If you are going to listen through the TV's speakers, have a listen to those before buying.
Hope this helps.