Digital Home Thoughts: The HD TV Evolution: Part 5 – Plasma is Hot Stuff

Continued...
Another side-effect of the barrier ribs is that, like a CRT shadow mask, they present an absolutely black backdrop for the image being generated so large expanses of black are exactly that - solid black, not 99.9999% black as in LCDs and micro-displays. Put another way: PDPs are the best there is at generating a blank screen. This is great for black levels; less-so for other colors, as it produces the well-known screen door effect mentioned above.

Finally, there is the well-known—and generally misunderstood—matter of image retention. Yes, even modern PDPs exhibit image retention. No, it is not permanent or fatal under normal video usage. Note the qualifier. Image retention is the result of individual pixel phosphors being continually excited to a constant level. Think of it as sort of a form of elasticity - you stretch a rubber band and let go, then it comes back to its normal length. You hold it long enough in the stretched mode, it doesn’t come back quite all the way. Do it long enough, often enough, and the rubber band will be noticeably longer than one that wasn’t so abused. So it is with PDP phosphors: with normal video content—movies, sporting events, talking heads, etc—the phosphors are stimulated to a constantly changing degree that over times averages out about the same for all pixels. With the result that phosphor excitation is pretty much uniform across the panel, no image retention occurs. Of course, non-video content—computer desktops and GUIs, text-crawler bands on news channels, video game HUDs and borders, and other digitally-generated imagery—can and does result in temporary image retention.

Modern PDPs have all sorts of tricks to minimize this effect (shifting the image by one or two pixels around the panel is one technique) but it is still there and with modern phosphors it is mostly a temporary inconvenience until normal video “scrubs” the panel back to normal. However, temporary or not, it still happens, so Windows or Mac desktops, XBOX 360 Hexic, card games, etc., are not good candidates for marathon sessions on PDPs if you are easily freaked out.

Now, display technology issues aside, how do HD PDPs stack up in the evolution of TV viewing?

Well, first of all, HD PDPs do not scale down well. They are not now, nor are they likely to be available anytime soon in under 40” sizes, so that whole segment—the bulk of the business—goes, by default, to LCDs, regardless of their virtues or faults.

Second, PDP price, mass, and power usage goes up significantly with screen size so don’t expect to see volume sales of cheap 70” PDPs this decade. It might happen, but in general, we can safely assume the 60”+ segment will be dominated by micro-display rear-projectors just on the strength of their scaling economics, as they can easily undercut PDPs by 50% at the 60” level and it gets worse as you move higher.

Finally, and most controversially, because PDP sub-pixel cells does not scale down well, resolution becomes an issue. Until late '05 it was believed that 1080p PDPs smaller than 60" were not economically viable, but Panasonic performed an engineering tour de force by demonstrating a 50" 1080p panel that should ship in the second half of '06. For all that, smaller 1080p PDPs should not be expected any time soon, and definitely not at the volumes and prices of 1080p LCDs. Do not expect to see anything higher than straight 720p resolution at 42” and do not expect to see 1080p at anything smaller than 50”. (Remember: brightness is a function of pixel size with PDPs, so increasing resolution requires both smaller pixels and getting more light per unit area out of each pixel).

As for Quad-HD native resolution, the next step in micro-display and LCD evolution? Sorry. Not in the cards. 1080p is almost certainly as high as PDP tech goes this decade. After that, SED or OLED had better be ready to pick up the emissive-display baton because otherwise the race is over.

Now, unlike some in the mass media, I don’t think PDP tech is doomed to extinction. Not with Matsushita/Panasonic furiously pumping money into the technology. But…

PDPs are currently only manufactured in volume by five companies, which together account for 99% of all the displays sold. Fujitsu, Samsung, and LGE are merchant suppliers, so most of the second tier vendors get their panels from them. Panasonic and Pioneer produce panels for in-house use only, with one or two partners on OEM basis—full displays, not component sales. And, while Panasonic has been very aggressive in expanding capacity, others have been less so. Pioneer actually reduced capacity in '05.

In the second quarter of 2005, total sales were divided as follows:

Samsung 29.1%
Matsushita 24.8%
LGE 23.7%
Pioneer 12.3%
Fujitsu 9.4%

Overall growth was 11% quarter-to-quarter, mostly due to Panasonic’s increase in production capacity - a healthy, profitable business.

PDP economies of scale project to decent sale price reductions over time, but nothing like the dogfight expected in the LCD arena. Typical panel pricing is expected to follow the following trends:

HDTV name-brand display pricing, US$


Overall, PDPs seem to be competitive in their size range, no? Except that most of the rear-projection units and direct-view LCD displays they will be competing against after '06 are going to be 1080 models, not 720.

That is going to hurt some.

Volume-wise, the PDP business will likely lag the explosive growth of LCD TV, simply because the bulk of future HDTV market growth lies in the under 42”, CRT-replacement business and the nearest CRT-equivalent to the PDP bread and butter 42” is the 32” model, which accounts for something like 12% of the existing installed base. So, unless a lot of folks get a hankering to move up two display sizes from their previous set, without a big resolution boost, the best PDPs can hope for, cost-issues aside, is for a one-eighth slice of the overall HDTV pie. Nice, but hardly comparable to the 2/3 market share expected for the LCDs.

Theoretically, one could argue that PDP manufacturers can drop prices faster than they currently are and that they can deliver true 720P 40” panels at 3LCD MD prices if they feel the need for it. If they physically can, they should. And soon. Because, otherwise, they face a highly competitive environment with one hand tied behind their backs.

Best guess here, is that the PDP business grows nicely, prices drop steadily but not dramatically, resolution improves gradually—true 720p replacing ED and stretched-XGA in the 42” products and 1080p replacing WXGA in the over-50 market, with a few thousand 65” models a year at the high end for the connoisseurs—creating basically a two-and-a-half product business.

Add it all up and the answer screams: niche product!

Indeed, if you look at the five top PDP panel vendors, you see that the only one of the five that isn’t selling HD PDPs as a premium-priced, connoisseur-only premium product is Panasonic. Yes, MAXENT and DELL and others offer low-priced PDPs. But that isn’t where the category volume lies. The future of PDP lies at the higher end.

One can even argue that PDPs don’t sell into the TV market at all. Their true market is as a low-end Home Theater product, not a TV-viewing product and that a proper comparison for PDPs is not rear-projection MDs and LCD flat panels but, rather, front-projection Home Theater systems. Certainly the viewing environment and viewer profile is a lot closer to the latter than the former.

PDPs are great for certain uses, certain users, but for common, ordinary TV use in the HD era they just don’t match up well with the way the market is evolving (smaller, cheaper screens, 1080-content, one-to-pixel mapping, gaming and other computer-generated imagery,etc). What PDP does match up well with are Home Theater enthusiasts, where the alternative to a PDP is a front projector.

It may also be your display of choice if the bulk of your display use is watching movies and TV under controlled viewing conditions—distance, lighting, display calibration just-right. If you don’t play games with static screen elements for extended periods of time, if either 42” or 50” is just right for you, if you truly intend to wall mount your display (only 29% of flat panel buyers do so, BTW), or if you literally don’t care about HD resolution and one-to-one pixel mapping at all.

Individually, those are not terribly big individual niches, but collectively they do sound like a healthy 12% cut of the future-sized market. PDPs are not going to die, but neither are they going to define HDTV much longer.

What mainstream consumers want and what mainstream consumers are going to get lies elsewhere; LCD and MD, mostly.

Next up: Penultimate chapter—the resolution wars!

Felix Torres is a dabbler in home entertainment electronics and a survivor of both the home computing wars of the 80's and the multimedia wars of the 90's who is currently most interested in home media networks and the North American transition away from broadcast media.