With so much going on, it can be quite daunting for anyone walking into a store who doesn't keep up to date with all the latest tech, so I'm going to try and simplify things for you.
What's the difference between LCD, LED and Plasma?
Let me start with LCD. LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display. The only part of the tv that is a liquid crystal display is the panel itself. What lights the tv is called the backlight. In traditional LCD tvs, the backlight is a fluorescent lighting system.
Inside each pixel of an LCD panel is typically a red, green and blue crystal. The crystals open and close in varying degrees to create a multitude of different colors. When an LCD tv attempts to produce black, the crystals have to close and try to block the backlight from shining through. Similarly, when it produces white, the crystals open all the way up to let the light flow through. LCD tvs deliver a very bright picture with minimal reflection, though struggle with producing good contrast and suffer with motion blur during fast action.
LED tvs are effectively an evolution of the LCD television. They share the same LCD panel, though they have had significant improvements in the backlighting system. These improvements include "local dimming" of the LED lighting system which improve contrast in sections of the screen where required. Another notable improvement is the introduction of backlight scanning to assist the motion technology. This helps with reducing motion blur, while also limiting the amount of "soap opera effect" that can be seen on screen.
Plasma TVs use a very different technology. Each pixel is effectively a light which is ignited by the gas in the plasma panel. As a result, plasma can produce very good contrast and has excellent response time, resulting in a very detailed image with minimal blur. The disadvantages of plasma are primarily power consumption, reflection (as the panel is made of glass) and image retention. Image retention is not screen burn, but a milder version of it. Screen burn used to happen quite frequently when plasma was in its infancy, where a still image, if left on screen for an extended period would be permanently branded in. These days it is very unlikely to happen unless there has been a large degree of carelessness from the user. Image retention, like screen burn displays an after image, however it's effects generally go away after a few minutes.
Ok then, so what is OLED then?
OLED or Organic Light Emitting Diode strangely enough almost shares more in common with plasma than current LED tvs. In a traditional OLED, each pixel will have a red, green and blue LED light. The lights activate whenever required, very similarly to plasma. Basically, OLED takes all the advantages of plasma and LED and rolls it into one. At this stage, OLED is still in its infancy, as a result, pricing is still rather exuberant.
Now, let's talk resolution!
Resolution is tech babble for how many dots or pixels there are on the screen. Currently the three most common resolutions are:
HD which is 1366 vertical lines by 768 horizontal lines
Full HD which is 1920 vertical lines by 1080 horizontal lines
And more recently Ultra HD which is 3840 vertical lines by 2160 horizontal lines.
To put it as simply as I can, it's almost like comparing 1 megapixel (HD), 2 megapixel (Full HD) and 8 megapixel (Ultra HD).
Though, don't be duped. Both salespeople and manufacturers will try and convince you this will deliver the best image, and it potentially could... If you were to feed a source capable of using that resolution. Take a DVD for example. DVD is standard definition, which by today's standards is fairly low in resolution. A DVD on an Ultra HD screen, if displayed in its native resolution will only display on 1/20th of the screen. So in order to use the full screen, the television is doing a process called upscaling, whereby it adds in resolution in order for the image to display full screen.
This doesn't tend to look very good.
Playstation 4 at this stage is the only device in Australia equipped to deliver an Ultra HD video signal, though at this stage we don't have the internet infrastructure in place to transmit such a high signal. Hopefully, if the NBN isn't carved down and reduced in quality, we will have speeds for Ultra HD video streaming within the next six years. Alternatively, I believe Sony are working on developing a 4 layer Blu-ray Disc (100GB) which will allow for a higher resolution video than current blurays.
I hope that this has cleared up some things for you, so you can make more educated decisions prior to your purchase. If you have anything you would like to discuss further, please comment below.
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