The One About Plasma Televisions

What happened to plasma televisions? Where did they come from? Let's learn how plasma TVs work and why the industry abandoned this technology. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Tech are Ya. So in the late nineteen nineties, televisions

(00:24):
were changing, specifically here in America, but all around the world.
So here in America we were used to big old
CRT televisions that's cathode ray tube TVs to you and me.
And they were real chonkers, bulky, they were heavy. They
contained capacitors that remained dangerous even after you turned the
television off. By the way, that's one reason to not

(00:48):
smash an old TV. If they're still charge stored in
the capacitors, you could get a real jolt, like a
deadly one. Televisions at that time had a four to
three aspect ratio in those days. That means for every
three units of height, you had four units of width.
That's why if you watch any old television programming today

(01:10):
on a modern TV, and if that programming hasn't been
adjusted to fit a modern television, there is always space
on either side of the screen. Resolution was, you know,
not great. If you wanted a really nice home entertainment system.
You often leaned heavily on the other components to help
pick up some of the slack you might have, like

(01:30):
a projection television, maybe a rear projection television. But yeah,
these things were huge. But that would really change in
nineteen ninety seven or so with the introduction of flat
screen televisions, led by a technology that took a different
approach to creating images. So with a CRT, you're using
a zapper, an electron gun, and it fires a stream

(01:52):
of electrons at the backside of a screen, and that
backside of the screen is coded in phosphor dots. And
when the elect trunds hit the phosphors, it excites the
phosphors and they end up glowing as they let out
this excess energy. They luminess. But this new technology was
using a different method to generate that light. It was

(02:14):
using an excitable gas that could then be precision controlled
by tiny electrodes. So this was the introduction of the
plasma television. Now these days, plasma televisions are kind of
like antiques or collector's items. No one is making them anymore.
In fact, the last major companies to make plasma televisions

(02:35):
stopped doing it in twenty fourteen, so it's been a
decade since these were consumer items. I mean, you could
still find them occasionally, but no one's making them for
a while. However, plasma television was in the running for
like the best television technology on the market. So I
thought we could talk about where this idea came from

(02:56):
and then what happened to plasma TVs. So we gotta
start a ways back, like sixty years ago, in nineteen
sixty four, and y'all, I'm going to just give highlights,
but if you want a real breakdown on the development
of the plasma display and the various technological challenges that
needed to be solved to make it a possibility, I

(03:18):
highly recommend you search for a white paper, an article rather,
and it's titled History of the Plasma Display Panel. It's
by Larry F. Weber Weber of I Triple E, or
as I used to say AE, and this article was
published in a journal called Transactions on Plasma Science. This

(03:39):
was back in two thousand and six. So knowing that
it was back in two thousand and six when this
was written, you need to forgive opening passages that say
things like quote, plasma displays are enjoying an unprecedented degree
of success as large screen televisions. End quote. Because that
was true in two thousand and six. These days not
so much. But despite the fact that you know it

(04:01):
has that dated reference, I mean it was written in
two thousand and six, the article itself phenomenal. I'll be
referencing it a lot in this episode, and I highly
recommend if you're more interested in the technical details that
you check it out. It's great. So, as Weber points out,
the early development of plasma displays, that work wasn't being
done with home television as being an end goal. In fact,

(04:21):
it wasn't even in the thought process at the time necessarily. Instead,
this was part of an effort to develop computer systems
that could be used for the purposes of education. So,
how do you make a high resolution display for educational
computer systems and do so in a way that makes

(04:41):
sense doesn't break the bank. So engineers and researchers at
the University of Illinois launched a project called the Programmed
Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, or PLATO. This was in
nineteen sixty when they first formed this project, and plato's
main aim was to research the possibilit of using computer
systems for educational purposes. Now today, millions of students around

(05:06):
the world do their homework on computers. They get class
assignments on computers. Computers are like an integral part of
education for lots of schools around the world. However, back
in nineteen sixty computers were still these big, centralized machines
that very few people had ever seen, let alone used.
If you were a computer science student, or you know,

(05:28):
if you worked at a research lab or perhaps some
military installation, then maybe you had some contact with computers.
I mean computer science, certainly you would have some contact.
But other than that, these were things that you heard
about but you never really encountered. Even as computers began
to make their way into the business world, very few
people still actually had the chance to get their hands

(05:49):
on them because these were still largely centralized machines. That
would pretty much remain the case until micro computers came
on the scene in the seventies and eighties. But anyway,
the folks on the Plato project were forward thinkers, and
in nineteen sixty four, Donald L. Bitzer and Jene Slatto,
both of whom were professors at the University of Illinois,

(06:12):
and apologies for my terrible pronunciation, but they, along with
a graduate student named Robert Wilson, tackled this challenge of
building a new display system that would be suitable for
the latest iteration of the project's computer, which at that
point was the Plato three. They were up to the
third generation of this computer system. So this next bit

(06:33):
gets technical, but it's also an example of a fortuitous
discovery that only happened because of an accident. As doctor
Frankenfurter would say, So, okay, it's the nineteen sixties swing
in sixties and semiconductor based memory has yet to really
become a thing, so that's not really an accessible technology

(06:53):
if you're designing a computer system. Still, your graphics displays
need access to memory in order to you know, display
stuff like bitmaps, so it's not just like a blip
on the screen. It's actually a sustained image. So a
bitmap is literally just a map of bits that represent light,
and older displays relied upon an external scan converter memory

(07:16):
tube in order to achieve this memory. These things, I mean,
they're external, so they're not part of the system itself.
They were bulky, They were expensive, and they were kind
of limiting in order to actually have this computer memory.
It was a big deal. So the team was trying
to figure out how to achieve memory internally in the

(07:36):
display itself and they started to work with neon. Now,
this neon depended upon a vacuum system for it to work,
but it turned out that the system they were using
as they were developing this display actually had a little
bit of a leak in it. And that's the accident
I was talking about. There was a leak in the

(07:58):
vacuum system and that allowed some air to mix with
the neon. However, that turned out to actually be beneficial
to the project because when the neon gas with this
mix of air in it would be excited, it would
emit an orange glow. Now, normally, if it were just
pure neon, if there were no other gases mixing with

(08:21):
the neon, that glowing would stop once the excited electrons
returned to their normal state. Essentially, once the electric charge
was turned off, it would just stop glowing. However, that
mixed air caused something interesting, and that's hysteresis. And if
you're wondering what the heck that is, allow me to explain,
because I just learned about it myself, So I know

(08:43):
about this, but I didn't know the word for it.
So hysteresis refers to the tendency of some phenomena to
linger after the cause of that phenomena has already gone. So,
for example, let's say you make an electromagnet out of
an iron nail and some copper wire, and you coil
the copper wire around the nail. You connect the wire

(09:04):
to a battery. You got yourself an electromagnet, and you
use it for a while to pick up paper clips
or whatever. And then maybe once you're done, you've disconnected
the wire from the battery, you've taken the nail out
of the coil. Maybe you notice that, hey, this nail
still is displaying some magnetic qualities that can still pick
up paper clips, even though it's no longer inside the

(09:27):
coil with electricity running through it. It's no longer an electromagnet.
It's acting more like a magnet. Well, that's hysteresis. The
electric current that generated the magnetic field is gone, but
the nail retains some magnetism, at least for a while.
It does fade over time and eventually just becomes a nail.
So with the neon display, the mixed and air caused

(09:49):
the neon to remain lit up after the charge had left,
so the display kind of had a memory, so to speak.
That was the solution to their problem, and again it
was all due to an accident. So this discovery prompted
the researchers to change their approach. They would purposefully introduce
a tiny bit of nitrogen into the neon gas in

(10:13):
order to accomplish on purpose what had first happened by accident,
which is a pretty darn cool story. I love stories
like that where you know, surely we would have arrived
at this discovery at some point, but the fact that
it happened by sort of luck, and in what you

(10:33):
would first think was bad luck because it relies on
your equipment not working the way it was intended to that,
to me is pretty cool. Now. I think it also
helps if we consider for a moment how plasma displays work,
like that's going to help us understand a lot about
this topic. So let's get to some basics. Images on
televisions and other displays, those are made up of pixels,

(10:57):
and you can think of pixels as being kind of
like at it's a basic unit of light. On a screen,
it's a point of light. So the full screen is
made up of thousands or millions of pixels, depending upon
the resolution of your screen. Typically, these pixels have one
of three colors associated with them, red, green, or blue.

(11:19):
Or they have subpixels like little cells filled with red phosphor,
green phosphor or blue phosphor. These RGB pixels are spread
evenly across the screen, so by controlling the brightness the
luminosity of each of those three colors, you can show
potentially millions of different shades of color. If you light

(11:41):
all three of those subpixels equally, you get white, right.
If you like none of them, you get black. If
you like combinations of them at different intensities, like you know,
like forty percent red, ten percent blue, etea that kind
of thing, then you can get lots of other different
colors represented on screen. In a plasma television, the pixels

(12:03):
are made up of individual cells that are sandwich between
other layers. I'll give you the typical outline of how
this works, because it depends specifically on the manufacturer and
what method they used, but generally speaking, we can get
an idea of how this works. But inside these individual
cells that are sandwiched between other layers, you have an

(12:26):
ionized gas. In other words, of plasma. Plasma is the
most plentiful state of matter in the universe. So when
I was a kid, I was taught about three states
of matter, solid liquid, gas. Plasma is technically a fourth
state of matter. It's a special kind of gas. It's
a gas that has free floating electrons, which means that
can do stuff like conduct electricity. Stars are made out

(12:48):
of plasma. Anyway, if you have plasma in a contained environment,
like an enclosed air type tube, and you apply voltage
to this tube, then you have electrons that are rushing around,
and you have positively charged atoms rushing around, and the
electrons are heading to the positively charged atoms, and the
positively charged atoms are heading toward the negatively charged electrons.

(13:09):
Because you know, opposite charges attract and when they collide,
you get excited atoms, and those atoms eventually let out
some of that excess energy in the form of photons
aka light. Now, with a lot of gases, the light
that's being released is actually invisible to us. It's in
the ultraviolet range, so we cannot directly perceive this light. However,

(13:31):
in turn, this ultraviolet light can excite special atoms called phosphors,
and some phosphors can emit light that is within the
visible spectrum. So you excite the gas atoms and you
get ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet light in turn excites the phosphors,
and then you get visible light. Okay, we're going to
take a quick break here. When we get back, we're

(13:52):
going to talk about that sandwich I mentioned earlier, and
I'm going to try not to have my stomach growl
because it's also lunchtime sandwiches. We'll be right back. Okay,
all right, we're back. I still haven't eaten lunch, so

(14:15):
we're gonna see how this goes. But if we do
think of a plasma display as a kind of sandwich,
the typical description of plasma displays goes something like this.
Your bottom piece of bread. The base of your sandwich
is a plate of glass, which I admit does not
sound that appetizing. On top of this plate of glass,
you have a series of vertically aligned electrodes, so they're

(14:38):
columns of electrodes. This is called the address electrodes. Then
you would have the layer of cells that contain the
gas that can be turned into a plasma once you
apply voltage to this gas, plus the cells that have
the subpixels coated in red, green, or blue phosphors, each
one assigned to one of the these cells of gas.

(15:02):
Then you have another layer that's a clear magnesium oxide layer.
This is to protect the next layer, which is another
layer of electrodes. Now these are arranged at a ninety
degree angle compared to the first ones. The address electrodes
that are on the bottom right, So these are in rows.
These are the display electrodes, and they by necessity need

(15:23):
to be transparent because the light needs to be able
to go through them in order for you to see
what's on a display. So now you actually have a
grid of electrodes. Right, You've got some that are running
along the bottom and vertical columns and some that are
running on the top and horizontal rows. Next you have
a dielectric material that insulates those display electrodes. And finally
you have the front plate of glasses the top slice

(15:46):
of bread on your sandwich. These displays are able to
send a specific voltage to a pair of electrodes at
a specific point on the display. You can think of
the display as just being a series of xy coordinates,
so you can see and end a voltage signal to
that pair of electrodes specifically at one location on the
screen in order for them to excite the gas inside

(16:08):
the cell, which then of course gives off ultraviolet light,
which in turn excites the phosphors coding the subpixels for
that cell, and then you get a point of light
on the display. Of course, this is actually happening at
different points all across the display at the same time,
and it's rapidly changing, right. That's how you get your
moving plasma image. All of those points of light on

(16:30):
a plasma display are coming from specific voltages applied at
precise locations on that grid of electrodes, thus exciting the
gas in that spot that then excites the phosphors, which
to me is super cool. Like, that's such a neat
approach to creating an image on a screen. I just
think it's incredibly interesting. I don't know, maybe it's just

(16:51):
because I'm a geek. Now, one benefit to this approach
is that you don't need as much depth to your
display as you would with a CRT, so remember I
said that CRT televisions are chonky. Well, a cathode ray
two displays width determines how deep it has to be
because the wider the screen is, the longer the tube

(17:12):
needs to be in order for the electron gun to
be able to reach across the entire width of the screen. Like,
larger screens get really super bulky. It's kind of like
having a projector, right, Like if you have a projector
and you're too close to a screen, well, the image
that you're projecting isn't going to take up the whole screen.
It's just going to take a part of it. You
have to move the projector back in order for it

(17:34):
to take up the whole screen. Same thing with these
cathode ray tube electron guns. They need to be a
certain distance from the back of the screen in order
to illuminate the whole thing. So the bigger your screen is,
the further back the electron gun needs to be, so
the larger the television would get. And you just get
these enormous, heavy, bulky TVs and it wouldn't make sense

(17:55):
beyond a certain amount, which is why you would get
like projection televisions instead. If you want a really big screen,
you need to either have a projector and a screen,
or you needed to have like rear projection, which was
still bulky, but not as big as if it were CRT.
So plasma displays didn't need to have so much depth
to them because the electrode grid does the same job

(18:17):
that the electron gun did in a CRT essentially, and
so plasma displays could be much thinner than CRTs were now.
By much thinner, I do mean, they still were thick
compared to the flat screen televisions you would buy today.
Like we're talking like six inches thick. That's still pretty
hefty if you compare it to the sort of stuff
you can buy, you know, in a store today. I mean,

(18:39):
some of the latest televisions are incredibly thin, but back
in the nineteen nineties, a six inch deep TV that
was velt. Anyway, It obviously would take quite some time
between pioneering this technology in nineteen sixty four and seeing
plasma televisions available in stores around nineteen ninety seven. I mean,
that's like three decades of time. So let's go back

(19:02):
to the history for a bit to look at some
of the milestones that led the way. Now as Weber
points out in that excellent article I mentioned at the
top of the show the plasma display researchers at the
University of Illinois. The thing they built it was great
for establishing that this was a viable technology, but their
display was a far cry from being suitable for commercial

(19:25):
or consumer applications. For one thing, the display itself measured
a total of one inch per side, so a one
inch by one inch screen. I think we can both
agree that's a bit on the small side, right. But
for another, it was made of some really fragile material,
so it wouldn't stand up to any sort of rigorous
shipping for example, much less like if you had kids

(19:48):
or pets, or maybe you like to play the Wii
and you don't use the risks straps, you know, like
you're instructed to come on be more responsible gamers. Anyway,
it was also kind of cluged together, this prototype display.
It had like really visible epoxy holding it together, and

(20:08):
they had problems with leaks and stuff like that. So
in short, the display panel showed that plasma displays could work,
but there were a lot of challenges that would need
to be addressed before it could approach being a reliable
display option, let alone a consumer television. So development continued
and within just a couple of years there were some

(20:29):
breakthroughs that saw massive improvements in design and that led
to the ability to do a little bit more streamline
manufacturing and the displays were able to develop. As a result,
they were still small, and they still had fairly low resolution,
but the improvements showed that plasma based displays could in
fact be a reality. Each success drove more innovation in

(20:52):
the space and allowed for larger displays with greater resolution.
So by nineteen seventy one, a glass company called Owen's
Illinois was able to produce the first commercial plasma display.
Now by today's standards, this was a pretty low resolution display.
It measured only five hundred twelve by five hundred twelve pixels,
so that meant the display had a little more than

(21:13):
two hundred and sixty thousand pixels in total if you
were to add them all up. Future high definition plasma
televisions could have as many as more than two million pixels.
But still, this twelve inch display made by Owens Illinois
was a big deal, and the Plato Project at the
University of Illinois became the first customer to order these

(21:34):
displays as part of their Plato Educational Computer System project,
and as Weber points out, it was a remarkably quick
turnaround to go from the first implementation of the technology
in nineteen sixty four to a finished product in nineteen
seventy one. I mean that's like, well seven years, that's
really fast for a brand new technology to go from

(21:57):
we just proved that this works to here's a product
based on that tech. Many other technical issues had to
be solved for plasma TVs to become a practical possibility, Like,
even with the advancements that had been done by nineteen
seventy one, we were a far cry from something that
would be acceptable in a home. For one thing, the

(22:18):
early displays were monochromatic, right, like, they did not have
full color capability for the earliest versions. It would take
some time to develop that. And even with chromatic displays,
there were still challenges. One of those was solving for
gray scale right, different levels of brightness so that you
could have something between the brightest bright and the darkest dark.

(22:40):
So in the early days of plasma displays, a pixel
could either be on or it could be off. It
was either as bright as it could be or it
was dark. You had nothing in between, so there was
no way of showing any kind of resolution within an image.
In the early nineteen seventies, companies like Hitachi and Mitsubishi
came up with a method to deal with this, and

(23:02):
essentially it involved cutting down the length of time each
pixel would fire, so you would create like pulses that
would light up a pixel, and to make a pixel
less bright, you would just pulse it less frequently, and
that would make it appear to be dimmer than the
neighboring pixels and thus would allow for grayscale. It was

(23:23):
known as the address while display method the AWD method,
and it would remain in use for several years before
engineers found alternative methods to achieve similar results. Now to
get color displays rather than monochromatic ones, engineers figured out
that placing little glass ribs in between the subpixels was key,

(23:46):
otherwise you would get these weird kind of saturated images.
Everything would come across kind of pastel. You didn't get
very vibrant color representation in early color plasma displays because
there was all this bleeding that was going on between
different pixels. So by adding these thin panels of glass.

(24:07):
It meant that each color of phosphors, the red, the green,
and the blue phosphors would kind of have their own
mini cell that was bordered by these thin glass panels.
So why was this important, Well, it's because ultraviolet light
doesn't travel through glass, so it became possible to more
precisely control which phosphors would be excited by ultraviolet light

(24:31):
and thus phosphores and so you could be much more
precise with which colors are being activated. And with that control,
you got more accurate color representation on the screen and
you didn't have to worry about pixels bleeding over into
each other because you were able to prevent that due
to these glass panels blocking the ultraviolet light that otherwise
would excite phosphors and cause them to discharge. So again,

(24:55):
very clever solution to a problem, creating these these glass ribs,
that's what they called them. So in nineteen seventy eight,
the Japanese Broadcast Corporation, which has the initialism NHK, built
a prototype full color plasma television. Way back in nineteen
seventy eight. It measured sixteen inches on the diagonal, and

(25:16):
this was a concept. It wasn't meant for manufacturing as
an end product. It was not ready for mass manufacturing.
It was just kind of a proof of concept television,
and it showed the possibilities of a flatter TV, which
really excited manufacturers. I mean, these would be electronics that
could take up less space and perhaps be thin enough

(25:36):
where you could even mount it to your wall, kind
of like a picture frame. That was, you know, sort
of a dream back in the nineteen seventies. Otherwise, what
you're going to have to do is cut a hole
in your wall, mount a CRT so that the screen
points through the hole, and hope that your wall is
thick enough to hold the rest of the CRT. Otherwise
you have the back end of a television sticking into
the kitchen or something. So it would take nearly two

(25:59):
decades before we would actually get to the first consumer
plasma televisions after NHK introduced this prototype, but again, the
prototype showed the possibility of what could be further in
the future. Other challenges involved figuring out how to protect
phosphors from degradation, so early plasma displays had issues with luminescence.

(26:20):
In fact, all plasma displays due to some degree, and
part of the problem was that the displays would grow
more dim as they were used more, particularly for plasma
displays that used alternating current. And let me explain why
that was. So. With direct current, you have two electrodes, right,
You've got one that's always the cathode, and then you

(26:41):
have another electrode and it's always the anode. Well, the
cathode generates ions, and those ions could damage phosphors. So
when you were designing a DC based plasma display, it
only made sense to put the phosphors closer to the
anode side than the cathode side, because you were distancing
them from these ions, and it meant that they were

(27:02):
less likely to get damage and thus lose some of
their luminescence in the process. However, AC alternating current based
plasma displays had a problem because with alternating current, the
role of cathode and anode switches places between the electrodes
many times a second, and this is the alternating bit

(27:23):
of alternating current. Right, The cathode and anode swap multiple
times a second, So the electrode that serves as the
cathode one moment becomes the anode the next moment. But
this meant that you couldn't just put the phosphors closer
to one electrode rather than the other, because both of
the electrodes are the cathode at some point many times
per second. Fujitsu came up with a solution by placing

(27:46):
the two sets of electrodes closer to one another, separated
by a dielectric layer to prevent electrical shorts, and the
phosphors would, rather than being in between the two layers,
would kind of be above them, and the electric fields
generated by those elects would be enough to excite the
gas within the cells that were positioned above this very
tight sandwich of electrodes, the phosphors could have the distance

(28:09):
needed to protect them from those pesky ions. Okay, I've
got a couple more things to say about the limitations
of plasma displays as well as their ultimate fate, but
before we get to all that, let's take another quick break. Okay.

(28:31):
I mentioned before the break that there were other issues
with plasma displays, and I kind of mentioned one. Degradation
is related to this, but it's in general, it's just brightness.
So plasma displays they just had a limit to how
bright they could be. Luminosity would be an issue for
plasma displays throughout their history. If you were to compare

(28:54):
a plasma display to an alternative like an LCD flat
panel television, then the LCD would look brighter than the
plasma display. You've got both showing the exact same video
feed at the same time. Unless you've gone in and
messed with settings to purposefully dim the LCD screen, it's
going to be brighter than the plasma one. The plasma

(29:17):
screens had incredible contrast ratios, but they didn't stand up
to the brightness of LCDs, and so in store showrooms
they weren't as bright and didn't attract as much attention.
But let's talk about contrast ratios for a moment, because
that is important. So this refers to the difference between
the brightest colors that can be displayed on a screen

(29:39):
and the darkest colors that can be displayed on that screen.
So with an LCD display, you wouldn't get as wide
a contrast ratio, meaning you didn't have as many degrees
of differentiation between the darkest darks and the brightest brights,
and that's because of a backlight. Plasma displays could either

(29:59):
have pixels were on or off, and an off pixel
would be almost pure black, not quite but close. So
those pixels just wouldn't be active, so they'd be dark,
but the pixel next door might be as bright as
it possibly could be. So the contrast ratio on a
plasma display is pretty remarkable typically, So in practice, this

(30:20):
meant you could watch stuff like a movie in which
a dark object is moving across a dark background and
you'd still be able to make out what was going on.
I can't tell you how many times I've watched horror
movies on a television that uses a backlight, and I'm
spending the whole time going what's happening. I don't even
know if I should be scared right now because I
can't see what's happening. So with a plasma display, if

(30:44):
you're watching a movie like that or something like, you know,
like one of the darker Batman films, it'd be great
because you could actually see what was happening on screen. Meanwhile,
with LCD displays, you have that backlight that's shining through
the entire display all the time. The back lights just active.
With the early LCD televisions. That is so LCDs are

(31:05):
made up of You can think of them as a
series of tiny little screens that have these liquid crystals
in them, and those liquid crystals can either allow light
to pass through or they can try to block that light.
But even when the crystals are blocking light, there's still
a little light that's bleeding through. It's kind of like
if you have a window shade, like a thin window shade,

(31:27):
and you pull it down and you're blocking light on
a bright sunny day, but you can still see that
there's light behind the shade because it's not thick enough
to block all that light. It's the same sort of thing,
and that means if you're watching something that's set in
a really dark location, then some of the light from
the back light is still making its way through the

(31:48):
crystals that are supposed to shield you from that light,
and you end up with kind of more of a
charcoal gray than a truly like pure black screen. So
if you have a dark figure moving around across a
dark background, you might not be able to tell the
difference between the figure and the background at all. So
movies like you know, Batman and those horror films and stuff,
they might be really hard to follow. The plasma screen

(32:11):
was perfect for representing the mini subtle shades, specifically of
darker colors. It just couldn't reach the levels of brightness
that you would get with alternative technologies. Now, there are
tons of other advancements that we could talk about here,
but they all get even more technical, and as I
mentioned earlier, Weber does a phenomenal job outlining them all.

(32:31):
So again I recommend you search for the article. It's
titled History of the Plasma Display Panel by Weber web
Er if you want to learn more about the technical
hurdles that engineers had to clear in order to make
plasma televisions a reality. Some of the issues get very
persnickety and the solutions were really creative. But yeah, this
episode would be like two hours long if I went

(32:53):
into every single one of them, and they do get
pretty pretty specific, So check out that are to learn more.
Let's just get back to the high points of the
history as a consumer technology. So by the mid nineteen nineties,
things were getting to a point where a consumer plasma
television was a possibility and Fujitsu would lead the way

(33:15):
and people were impressed. When Fujitsu introduced this plasma TV,
it was forty two inches on the diagonal, and it
was much much much thinner than a CRT, even a
CRT of a relatively small screen size like a twelve
inch television. It had more depth than one of these
plasma televisions did, so it took up way less space

(33:35):
at least on a depth perspective, and forty two inches
was really impressive. So remember CRTs had to be bulkier
if you wanted a larger screen. And it also meant
that the screen aspect ratio was different. It was now
sixteen to nine instead of four to three. Again, that's
for every nine units tall, it's sixteen units wide versus

(33:58):
for every three units it's four units wide. That does
make a difference. Like that's why again, if you watch
old TV programming you get those bars on either side
of the screen because the old televisions worked on a
different aspect ratio than modern ones do. One thing that
remained a problem for early plasma televisions was burn in,
So this happened if a plasma TV screen was left

(34:22):
displaying the same image for a really long time. This
often would happen with folks who were video gamers. Right
if you paused a game and walked off and you
left the TV on and it stayed on that screen
for a long time, you could get burn in. So
what would happen is that the phosphors would heat up
because they're being excited by this ultraviolet light. They're continuing

(34:44):
to display images through luminescing, and as they would heat up,
they would get damaged, and that would mean that you
would get some degradation there. They'd lose their own so
that the next time they're illuminated, they aren't as bright
as they were before. And that meant if you started
watching anything else the affected phosphors, the ones that were

(35:07):
burnt out, they would appear to be a little dimmer
than they were supposed to be, and it would be
like you were looking at a shadow of that image
that had been held on the screen for far too long.
This was burn in, and it would end up being
one of the drawbacks to early plasma televisions, and it
also was a selling point for salespeople who are pushing

(35:28):
LCD televisions over plasma televisions. Even later, plasma televisions still
had to contend with burn in like that was an
issue that remained a problem, although different manufacturers found ways
to mitigate it to some extent so that it wasn't
as likely, but it could still happen. It was never
eliminated fully. Now, one advantage plasma televisions had over backlit

(35:53):
TVs was that manufacturers could make them really big, like
more than one hundred in on the diagonal big, if
you really wanted to. However, it was hard to go
the other way. It was hard to make smaller plasma televisions.
Now you might say, well, that doesn't make sense. The
very first plasma display was one inch by one inch.

(36:14):
How much smaller are you going to get? When I
say it was hard, I don't mean that it was
technically hard. It was hard to make them so that
you could sell them for a reasonable amount of money.
Smaller televisions, those that were like thirty two inches or smaller.
It was hard to produce plasma displays of that size
and still have them make economic sense. You started to

(36:36):
run up against an issue where customers wouldn't be willing
to spend the money it would take in order to
make a profit off of making these things, because it
would feel like you're spending more money to get less
real estate. However, if you did want to go bigger.
Plasma was a really good choice in the early days,
like plasma was cheaper on the larger end than LCD

(36:58):
based televisions. But the battle was on between plasma and lcdtvs,
and this got way more complicated in the mid two
thousands upon the introduction of LED backlt televisions. So these
were LCDs that used LEDs for that backlight. They were
brighter than plasma screens, so you could use them in
brightly lit rooms and that would not really be an issue.

(37:20):
They didn't have as good an angle of view like
with plasma TVs. You could be way off to one
side or the other and still have a good view
of what's happening on the screen, whereas with LEDs there
was more of a limitation there. And they also had
a lower contrast ratio than plasma screens. We mentioned that already. However,
LED screens consumed way less power than plasma televisions did,

(37:43):
so your electric bill would be lower if you're using
an LED backlit LCD television rather than a plasma television.
That brightness issue, though, I think that was the real killer,
because if you were a consumer and you were shopping
for televisions and you went to a retail store, you
would see the difference right in front of you. Right.
The plasma screens just weren't as bright as the LCD

(38:04):
TVs with led backlight. Color representation with plasma was amazing,
but that brightness issue caused a lot of people to balk.
I mean, a lot of these stores just are under
these bright fluorescent lights, and plasma TVs just didn't look
as vibrant. There were some that would use like a
darkened area to show off the televisions, and plasma televisions
probably did a little better there, but generally, unless you

(38:26):
were someone who was big into the in home theater setup,
you probably weren't thinking in terms of I'm going to
watch this in a darkened cave. You know, you might
be watching it in a living room with lots of
natural light and stuff, and you want to have a
screen you can actually see. So the LCD television started
to perform better in sales. Again. For gamers, the plasma

(38:47):
televisions represented a dangerous investment. If you did put your
game on pause so you could wolf down some pizza
or whatever, you did so knowing that you might accidentally
burn in an image of solid snake hiding in a
cardboard box or something on your screen, and then you know,
when it came time to watch Mean Girls or whatever,
you'd have this shadow image of solid snake on Wednesdays
when we're supposed to wear pink. It's a total bummer, dude.

(39:10):
The LED backlighting alternative presented a real challenge because earlier
LCD televisions were about the same thickness as plasma displays.
They weren't that different, but the introduction of an LED
backlight meant that manufacturers could make televisions even more slim
than they already had been. So here you had even
thinner screens that were more energy efficient and sometimes could

(39:33):
provide even better resolution than plasma screens. The color representation
on a plasma screen might be superior, but the actual
picture quality and the brightness could be better on an
LCD television with LED backlight. So plasma began to give
way to these alternative technologies, much to the chagrin of
devoted plasma TV fans. Now, for the manufacturers, this meant

(39:56):
that plasma televisions were less marketable than LED TV, that
you would make less money if you stuck with plasma
than you would if you went with LED. So one
by one, manufacturers began to pull the plug on plasma
television production. Plus, once we got past twenty ten, we
started seeing innovative work in O LEAD screens, organic LED displays,

(40:18):
as well as the introduction of ultra high definition television.
We're talking like four K TV at this point, and
that was a real blow to plasma television because a
lot more work was going to be needed to make
plasma TVs capable of displaying UHD resolutions like they could
do high resolution, but it would take even more innovation

(40:40):
in the space to create a technology that would allow
plasma to display four K resolution. With LED backlet displays,
four K was a more achievable goal. There was less
of an on ramp needed to achieve four K resolution
with that technology, So that was another big blow against
plasma and with that decline in interest in the market

(41:01):
and this these hefty technical challenges that were in the way,
companies opted to phase out plasma television in favor of
LED and then OLED displays. The last major manufacturers making
plasma screens got out of the game in twenty fourteen,
as I mentioned earlier, so the last decade for the
last decade, rather, plasma televisions have been kind of an
abandoned technology now. Personally, I think plasma TV technology was incredible.

(41:26):
I never owned a plasma television, that I always wanted
one because the colors were so beautiful on those screens.
And you know, I am of the opinion that once
you reach a certain level of resolution, depending on how
far away you are from viewing your television and how
big the screen is, you get diminishing returns. Right Like

(41:48):
the way I have my setup at home, I just
have a regular HDTV. I don't even have a four
K TV setup in my living room, and partly because
of the size of the screen and how far away
I am from it, I don't really notice. Like if
I had swapped it out for a four K screen,
I probably would be able to tell a little bit,
but it wouldn't be dramatic. Right, So, for me, resolution

(42:10):
was not necessarily the most important factor for a television. Now. Granted,
if I had one hundred and twenty inch screen and
I was sitting like four feet away from it, I
probably would need a very high resolution screen or out
so I would start seeing the limitations. That's just not
how I view TV, so it's not a big deal
for me. For me, color representation is a more important

(42:33):
part of it. So yeah, plasma TV really would appeal
to me in that regard, But it's a moot point.
It is a thing of the past. I think it
still served to be an enormous leap over cathode ray
tube technology, but ultimately alternatives to plasma were more practical
and arguably more capable in the long run. Plasma TVs

(42:53):
or plasma displays, I should say, are still used in
various industries for different reasons, but when it comes to
home televisions, it's officially a thing of the past. So
I hope you enjoyed this look back on plasma technology
and how it worked in plasma televisions. Curious if any
of y'all out there have a plasma TV that you
still use. I know a lot of people like they

(43:14):
upgrade their televisions fairly regularly. I'm one of those old
dudes who just buys a TV and uses it till
it don't work no more. So. My television is not
a smart TV. It is not an Ultrahi definition television.
It is hooked up to a smart TV device. So
I do get those capabilities, and technically the device is

(43:35):
capable of showing four K resolution. It's just my television
can't do that, so it's kind of a lost feature
for me. But yeah, maybe in a different past I
would have been like one of those diehard plasma TV fans.
I certainly saw the appeal of plasma television. I just
never bought one. Anyway. That's it for this episode. I

(43:58):
hope all of you out there are doing well, and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

(44:18):
favorite shows.