Why did plasma TV's lose out over LCD and LED?

Correction: It’s an HD LED TV. Shows how much attention I pay.

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I’m one of those unfortunate souls who can see phosphor lag on Plasma TVs. Kinda wished that I’d saved my money for a good 50 inch lcd/led tv with good input lag.

Modern plasma televisions have an expected lifespan of about 60,000 hours, which is not only on par with LCD televisions, but would last a typical family 20 or 30 years. For someone like myself, it would be more like 40 or 50 years. I think that’s long enough that it shouldn’t be a problem.

I’m also a little perplexed about all the complaints about the glare. I have one of the earlier plasma sets (2006 model) and the glare doesn’t bother me no matter how bright it is in the room. I can only see any reflection at all in the black bars on the side of the screen when it’s in 4:3 format which isn’t that often. I admit I’m not terribly picky but modern plasmas have improved in this aspect so I can’t imagine it being a problem.

Undoubtedly plasmas do have their disadvantages but they have their advantages as well. I think if they die off, it’ll be due to an undeserved bad reputation.

I guess plasma is one of those originally better technologies that had a cheaper technology catch up and overtake through economy of scale and “brute force”, like Foveon digital camera sensors. They were supposedly better (no interpolation), but were made obsolete by just driving megapixel counts upwards.

Regarding one of my wholesaler, they had lots of problems with Plasmas due to broken screens.
They stopped selling Plasma Screens for that reason and have way less problems with LED/LCD in that regard.

For me personally it was more down to using my PC as a home entertaining system with my TV and LCD’s had a better resolution at the time.

Also as far as production goes, your general computer monitor (desktop & laptop) is the same as a TV (LED/LCD) without the tuner part – so production for LCD/LED is also way more economic.

For Xmas 2012 we bought the parents a 54" plasma… it was about 10% cheaper than a similar LCD.

They had a dark room, and one parent sat off to the side at a 45 degree viewing angle - it was the perfect TV for them.