Flat Panel Roundup

In the world of flat panel displays, manufacturers now tend to focus R&D on consumer models, with industrial versions coming afterward.

When it comes to monitors, it's no news flash that flat and thin are cool. Flat and thin have been tauntingly tempting since the first plasma monitors appeared with rich, sharp colors and equally opulent prices, and since the first flat panel LCDs bumped CRTs off elitist desktops. It's been a slow evolution to shed the prohibitive early pricing and to fulfill market expectations. That evolution, however, is now clearly well on its way.

Over just the last year or two, flat panels have matured technologically and reached a critical mass to support much more aggressive pricing. In turn, those more affordable prices have greatly expanded the installed base of flat panels in screening rooms, boardrooms, on-air studios, and editing desktops. And new affordability and availability has also helped ignite the markets for public signage in cinemas and shopping malls and, of course, consumer televisions.

Indeed, the emergence of a vibrant consumer market is the biggest change in flat panels, and the effect on the pro A/V market is mixed. According to Pacific Media Associates, it's been a little less than two years since consumers started buying more “large” (24in. and above) flat panels than professional markets. Today, the consumer market accounts for at least 75 percent of flat panel business. While increased consumer demand has ultimately lowered pro A/V prices, it has also reversed the business production strategies of manufacturers. Just a year or two ago, most manufacturers would focus R&D and industrial design primarily on the pro A/V market, developing and releasing industrial models before consumer models. Today the opposite is true.

Given the potentially enormous volumes, consumer models with built-in TV tuners, minimal connectivity, and trendy industrial design are now built and released before professional models with component inputs, expansion slots for networking, and other industrial features. For example, Sharp should be ready to ship its consumer version of the highly anticipated 45in. LCD around the time you read this, but it likely won't have the industrial version until next year. The same is true of Samsung's 46in. LCD panel.

A lot of consumer flat panel success has come from LCD TV products, which hints at a technology war anticipated for a couple of years now. Plasma makers have already responded to the increased competition by lowering prices. The expected battle between the competing flat panel technologies, however, isn't as direct as one might think.

As is evident in our charts, there is still a fairly solid dividing line between LCD and plasma in terms of available sizes at about 41in., above which is all plasma and below which is LCD. The three exceptions are Panasonic's 37in. plasma (TH-37PW6UZ), LG's L4200AT 42in. LCD, and Clarity Visual's Bay Cat 46in. LCD. Interestingly, that 40in. line isn't new. The nature of plasma's compartmentalized gases makes smaller monitors difficult and (in light of LCD's growth) uneconomical to produce. LCD makers have been slower than some expected in increasing panel sizes above 40in.

On the other hand, a few 40in. LCDs have arrived over the last year, and it is only a matter of time before Sharp, Samsung, and others release industrial versions of larger panels. Yet, even as LCD panel sizes increase, it is not clear that they will replace plasmas. First and foremost, plasma still has a significant price advantage over LCD for similarly sized panels, often as much as 2:1. More important to video professionals, plasmas still retain a noticeable side-by-side image quality advantage thanks to better color reproduction and faster refresh.

LCD panels do offer higher resolutions and sharper text and computer graphics, which make LCD the better choice for many conference rooms and public signage (for example, flight information at airports), where data and text are more important than motion video. Therefore, in professional installation markets, this technology war seems to be coming down to a more straightforward analysis of needs.

The enormous increase in consumer LCD TV and plasma TV products has made it more difficult to isolate professional A/V, industrial, and commercial models. For the purposes of these charts I have not included products with built-in TV tuners, with a few exceptions, but even that criterion is not as straightforward as a year ago because the cost of including an NTSC tuner is minimal and manufacturers such as Planar, LG, and Philips tend to add tuners to both classes of products. On the other hand, ATSC tuners are still costly enough to be prohibitive in most pro models, and at least one company, ViewSonic, is now going the other direction and removing tuners from most of its product line.

Several manufacturers no longer publish brightness and contrast numbers because of a lack of industry standards in measuring and reporting. Where manufacturers do, it might appear that plasmas are generally much brighter than LCDs. However, because plasmas will produce a brighter isolated spot on the screen than if the entire panel were lit, plasma brightness specs are always taken over a small area with most of the screen black. Making the whole screen white causes significant dimming in overall brightness. Conversely, an LCD's backlight is always on with the light either coming through or being hidden, and thus brightness does not vary.

Plasma's better black levels help yield better contrast ratios than LCDs, although LCDs fare better in awkward ambient light than plasmas. That can create situations where LCDs' contrast appears better to the naked eye, regardless of the numbers.

Finally, while most of the products less than 20in. are 4:3, all of the panels 23in. and larger are 16:9, even though some have 4:3-appearing aspect ratios. The advantage of those panels is a one-to-one pixel for incoming 4:3 computer sources.

In broad terms, this size category might by dominated by computer monitors and LCD TVs destined to fit under kitchen cabinets. I have, however, included only monitors without TV tuners and with video (not necessarily data) inputs. This group reveals a couple interesting trends.

First, just as small LCD monitors now proliferate on camcorders, they are also replacing miniature CRT monitors in production racks and as accessories for almost any type of video production gear. Due to the many possible permutations, I have not included multi-monitor rack configuration in this chart, but each company listed offers LCD production racks.

Most of the smaller, 10in. and less, monitors here represent production and visualization aids and provide sufficient quality to make, for example, framing or switching decisions. Sony's and Panasonic's new LCD monitor lines, however, aim directly at the professional video and older high-quality production CRTs. Ultimately, even the manufacturers acknowledge that LCD video quality can't yet equal that of CRTs. Discerning eyes will still see ghosting, and colors still can't quite match, but LCD quality is getting very close. The benefits of flat — space savings, reduced power consumption, and “cool” — often outweigh the drawbacks in all but the most critical situation (color correction, for example).

This is the current sweet spot for LCD technology, which not only dominates the category, but also basically created it for flat panels. LCDs still bear heavy prices compared to traditional CRT TVs (and even much larger RPTVs), but flat is “phat,” and this size of monitor has tremendous appeal in nonlinear editing environments, in smaller conference rooms, and as point-of-sale public signage.

Interestingly, each of these monitors has at least 1280×768 native resolution and collectively has much higher native resolutions than any other size category. That makes these ideal multi-synch monitors for both computer and motion video sources, including HD.

If there is a technology war between LCD and plasma, it happens here. Until recently, 42in. was the sweet spot for plasma technology, and even now there are some two dozen different 42in. panels, plus a 43in. model. However, the last year has produced a handful of 40in. LCDs, as well as the first of an expected group of 45in. and 46in. panels. That has put the heat on plasma to evolve, and there's evidence that it is happening.

A year ago most 42in. plasmas were WVGA resolution. Today the majority are XGA or WXGA and, therefore, require less scaling for HD sources. Plasma makers have improved color range — to retain plasma's image quality advantage over LCD — and phosphor lifespan. Burn-in is much less of a problem with moving video images than it is on those static airport monitors, and with that type of use plasma makers have more than quadrupled the expected lifespan since early prototypes to 60,000 hours. While LCDs do not suffer burn-in, backlight brightness does fade over time and can be down to half the brightness over a similar period.

Finally, prices on plasmas have dropped significantly over just the last year, by as much as 25 percent to 35 percent.

This is the glamour category for flat panels, particularly for products more than 60in. Although prices are dropping dramatically, the biggest panels still carry sizable price tags and, thus, have the most modest sales volumes. Pioneer has just joined the 60in. group with its new PDP-614MX, but that addition is a direct result of Pioneer's acquisition of NEC rather than a more autonomous product line increase. More interesting, a couple of companies, Fujitsu and Planar, have at least temporarily stopped offering a 60in. plasma. And, while Samsung has been showing its 80in. plasma for almost a year and LG has been promising a 76in. model, neither is ready to commit to a product release date.

While 60in. panels don't face any immediate competition from LCD, rear projection monitors are becoming increasingly svelte. At 60in., a 10in. to 12in. depth doesn't feel that different from a 4in. to 5in. depth. What's more, InFocus now has a DLP rear projection model that's just 6.3in. deep, weighs about 30 percent less at 95lbs., and at $10,999, costs significantly less than 60in. plasmas.

Conversely, 50in. panels are now very much mainstream plasma products and, unlike the 40in. category, have no competition yet from LCD makers. Hitachi and ViewSonic have even released 55in. plasmas for less than $10,000. With a four-digit price tag and less than 2.5in. shorter than 60in. diagonals, these 55in. models may be the best of both worlds.

Jeff Sauer is a freelance video producer and industry consultant. He directs the DTV Group Lab, an independent research and testing facility in Cambridge, Mass.

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