3D Tech Review

I thought the war between Plasma and LCD had already been won decisively by LCD. But apparently plasma (aka Plasma Display Technology or PDP) has some advantages in the 3D market:

- Cheaper at larger sizes. Since 3D screens are generally larger, PDP overindexes in 3D markets
- Faster response times. This is a biggie. Here’s what’s going on.

An LCD uses polarization to control the intensity of each pixel. The speed at which a pixel can go on and off is called response time, and is usually measured in milliseconds, or thousands of a second. 2ms, 4ms, 8ms, – those are common values.

Plasma works by the ionization of gas, and it is fast. Turn on the juice, and the pixel lights up. Turn off the electricity, and the plasma immediately stops emitting light.

Where you see plasma’s advantage is when an object moves across the screen. If there are 1920 pixels across, and it takes 8 ms for a pixel to fully go dark, then a small dot moving across the screen will look blurred. If that dot is 20 pixels, and it moves across the screen in 1 second, then each pixel should be lit up about 10ms. if it takes another 8ms for the pixel to shut down, then the ball will look stretched to be about twice as wide as it should be.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63I0HQ20100419

In 2D, the LCD blur is annoying. In 3D, it can destroy the illusion of 3D, so it’s a just more important effect to try to fix, especially since 3D programming heavily skews towards action movies and fast-moving sports.