The sweet point.

Plasma and LCD displays continue to compete, with the latter now making the manufacture of plasma screens much below 42″ an uncompetitive proposition. But though plasma displays are heavier and use more energy than LCDs, and though they use a glass front plate with all the attendant issue of reflections, they remain the standard by which contrast range is judged. Nothing beats the blacks of a plasma screen.

What prompts this piece is my use of an inexpensive LCD display for display of art on the wall. I thought it might be interesting to compare prices of plasma displays at different screen sizes.

For some five years now the 104″ Panasonic plasma display has been the largest readily available plasma display, starting out at some $90,000. You see them now and then on TV where they are used for presentation purposes, though it is ordinarily far cheaper to simply use a blue screen behind a news anchor to project charts and the like.

The Panasonic 104″ display.

That Panny whopper has come down in price a lot, and I compare the most common Panny 1080p plasma displays for size, price and weight in the following table. The ‘Area ratio’ refers to the relative surface area of each screen compared to the 42″ one. So the Panny 104″ has more than six times the area of the 42″:

The chart clearly shows that the pricing sweet spot fades rapidly once the screen size exceeds 65″, and you can bet that there’s not that much left to be gained from economies of scale, as it’s unlikely that displays larger than 65″ will ever sell in the quantities needed to really bring prices down. Homes are simply not large enough, for the most part, and the logistical nightmare of installing a 500 lb. display does the rest.

Not that I would complain if you gave me that 104″ display, having lived with a 100″ projection screen in our previous home. The problem with the projection screen was that you needed a darkened room for the overhead projector to cast a contrasty image, but the price of the installation was a small fraction of the Panny plasma whopper.

Cost of a 100″ projection system.

Power consumption – a few watts, compared to 1,500 for the giant Panasonic.