New Hampshire-based DisplayMate Technologies, maker of “video calibration, evaluation, and diagnostic products”, conducted a thorough comparison on the display quality of plasma TVs and LCD TVs, resulting in a long, jargon-riddled but ultimately revealing article that declares the plasma TVs as winners.
The author of the article, DisplayMate president Dr. Raymond Soneira, singled-out the lack of a respectable viewing angle on LCD TVs, as seen in the pictures below. If you think that Dr. Soneira is nitpicking, think again. He adds, “The significance of this [the narrow viewing angle] is enormous, because it means that the ’sweet spot’ for seeing an accurate picture on an LCD HDTV is only one person wide, even for these top-of-the-line models, so essentially everyone looking at an LCD HDTV will see a picture with noticeably different coloration.” Wow.
But more than praising plasma technology, Dr. Soneira criticized the “marketing gimmicks” of all TV manufacturers – hyping their TVs with “features” like Dynamic Backlight, Dynamic Contrast, Dynamic Black, Dynamic White, and Dynamic Color that do nothing but “reduce picture quality and accuracy and introduce ugly image artifacts.” Other features such as contrast ratios and brightness were either exaggerated or “misunderstood.” The sad part? Most customers don’t care. Perhaps in the HDTV market, size is all that matters for most people.
