It’s almost unavoidable: sooner or later, one day you’ll face the choice when you plan to buy your next HDTV. Whether you're planning to turn your living room into your dream home cinema or make it your own private membership seat to watch live sports events, you'll face the choice and you’ll have to decide between buying a Plasma or an LCD. You can still buy an old-fashioned CRT analogue TV, but most likely you'll be searching for a brand new Plasma or LCD, two of the mainstream cutting edge widescreen technologies available.

In fact, currently there are several technologies available on the   High Definition Televisions (HDTV) flat screen market: Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), Plasma Display Panel (PDP), Digital Light Processing (DLP), and the emerging Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED). Of these, I will only focus on the two most popular and reliable (LCD and Plasmas), both of which can be conveniently mounted on a wall with sizes ranging from 36 inches to 71 inches.

To analyse these two concurrent technologies, we need to understand how we are going to compare them and which criteria are worth measuring. When it comes to choosing a TV with High Definition (HD), size and picture quality are definitely the first things to bear in mind. However, that is not enough. With the quality of picture getting ever better, there other key elements to keep in mind, namely what do you want to view, and where do you want to view it. And, of course, price, reliability, lifespan and other features are also important in the final choice.

In this Hub I’ll describe and compare the strengths and weaknesses of each technology, leaving my final advice to the end. The comparison will always be made between Plasma and LCD.

Plasma TV’s are based of hundreds of thousands of individual pixel cells, which allow electric pulses (stemming from electrodes) to excite rare natural gases (usually xenon and neon) causing them to glow and produce light. This light illuminates the proper balance of red, green, or blue phosphors contained in each cell to display the proper color sequence from the light. Each pixel cell is an individual microscopic florescent light bulb, receiving instruction from software contained on the rear electrostatic silicon board. You can learn more about the technology here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_display

Plasma Strengths
Globally speaking, the main advantage of Plasma TV’s when compared to LCD’s is its far superior picture quality, which produces much deeper and accurate colors. Indeed, because they have better and deeper black level performance, they are also better for motion images (like sports) and they provide a better viewing angle than LCD’s. You can find Plasma TV’s with sizes until 71 inches and the prices are usually better for bigger flat screens when compared to its parent rival. For all this, plasma viewing experience is excellent and can be more close to cinema, because the picture quality is richer.

Plasma Weaknesses
The most common problem pointed at plasma TV’s is always the image burn, an issue which used to be annoyingly common. Image burn is a permanent disfigurement of areas on TV which can happen with phosphor-based electronic displays, usually due to uneven usage of pixels such as the prolonged display of non-moving images and it can create a permanent ghost-like image of these areas. Because of this, the lifespan of a plasma TV can be shorter, especially if it’s intensively used for video games. However, recent improvements to plasma screens have made them significantly more durable and resistant to image burns.

Another thing you need to bear in mind about plasma Tv’s is that, because it uses natural gases (Xenon, Argon and Neon) to display pictures, it does not work properly at high altitudes. Most plasma television manufacturers will recommend that you use their TV below 6000 feet.

Other disadvantages that can be important for some people are its weight – usually 10% heavier than an LCD – and the fact that it is not suitable for spaces with a lot of light, because plasmas are made with a special glass surface that can reflect light. Also, for the average flat screen sizes (until 41 inches), plasmas are now more expensive.

LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screens use two sheets of polarizing material with a liquid crystal solution between them. An electric current passed through the liquid causes the crystals to align so that light cannot pass through them. Each crystal either allows light to pass through or blocks it. When hit with an electrical charge, the crystals untwist to an exact degree to filter white light generated by a lamp behind the screen, reproducing colors through a process of subtraction: they block out particular color wavelengths from the spectrum of white light until they're left with just the right color. Learn more about LCD technology : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display

LCD Strengths
We have seen already that plasmas are better in regarding picture quality, but LCD’s have other advantages. They are more resistant for intensive usage (+8 hours a day) than plasmas because LCD’s don’t suffer any kind of image burn, which makes its lifespan longer then the rival plasma. And because LCD’s aren’t susceptible to image “burn-in”, they are far better for gaming and to connect to a computer, if you want to use it for both purposes, LCD’s screens are brighter than Plasmas, which makes it more adequate for spaces with bright lighting (like a kitchen, for instance). Other things that can important for some people are the weight (LCDs are light, movable and they can be mounted as easily as they can stand on their own) and energy efficiency, where LCD’s are slightly better than equivalent size plasma models.

LCD Weaknesses
Again, I have to start by remembering the inferior picture quality of LCD’s when compared to plasmas. Because of the way LCD’s process the electrical signal, there is also a slight delay in motion images, called picture ghosting. In practical terms, that means that watching fast motion images (like sports or action movies) can result in a poorer experience than with Plasma. Other disadvantages are its poorer viewing angle, due to more “pixelized” images, and the fact that prices are usually more expansive for larger sizes.

To provide a solid advice to anyone facing a choice between plasma and LCD, I would start by understanding where do you plan to watch your brand new flat screen and for what main purpose you will use it. If you are looking for a smaller screen to put in a kitchen, bedroom or small living room, LCD is probably your best bet. In fact, I would say that if you're looking to buy a TV less than 40 inches, then LCD is probably your only choice among the two. Anything after that size, and assuming you are you're looking for a home cinema screen and you don’t live in a place above 6000 feet high, then a larger plasma TV may be the right choice for you.

The current market data shows that sales of LCD’s are growing faster then Plasmas, a trend which can be easily explained by the fact that most people are buying flat screens until 41 inches and are planning to integrate it with other digital devices like computers, game consoles, ipods, and others. And, of course, let’s not forget that price is a much more decisive factor than picture quality when it comes to buying a new flat screen - and LCD’s are cheaper for smaller sizes.