Taiyaki wrote:Plasma's did degrade pretty fast in terms of their brightness output I found. I kept my Panasonic VT50 for almost 8 years (I had a VT25 back in the day before it), but by year 4 or so I noticed the peak brightness capabilities to have diminished quite a bit (I ended up having to push it up for the later years). I think there's very little chance that a used Plasma today could in any way shape or form output the levels of brightness a new high end OLED would be capable of (the newest high end OLED's do closer 180cd/m2), in many cases OLED would possibly win even with BFI enabled.
More importantly I'd have to ask, unless you play in a very bright room would that even matter? For SDR there's a point where enough is enough, and as a user who tends to try and play in a darker room I would not want it beyond the standard calibration goal of 100 nits brightness for SDR anyway.
Same, I'd like to think of extra luminance as a reserve/tank for panel durability, if kept at a constant level. Anything above 110nits feels too bright for my eyes.
But Plasmas are known for being durable, some of the later panels are rated at 100.000 hours (30 years/8 hours per day), so I'm not sure why you saw such a drastic difference on your VT50. I noticed that Plasma luminance is heavily dependant on 2 factors: Coating and energy consumption.
The coating helps with contrast, black levels in particular, but can also block a significant amount of the light emitted by the panel. It is a necessary evil however, or you'll have a very bright panel with no black levels that reflects ambient light and washes the picture (ask me how I know that
). The VT50 is known to have the best black levels among Plasmas:
https://www.avforums.com/reviews/panaso ... eview.276/
Energy consumption should be obvious enough, a brighter panel needs more power. Late Plasma models needed to be more efficient due to strict regulations, and this resulted in lower luminance levels, albeit still enough to reach proper calibrated levels.
Perhaps late dark-tinted Plasmas have aged worse than older models due to these factors, but each case must be analyzed individually.
And yes, you're right, a brand new display will surely have higher luminance than a 10+ year old one, but considering the price/performance difference between Plasma and OLED, I'd say the older tech is still an interesting proposition.
Josh128 wrote:Just wanted to drop in and say we still have 4 F series Sammy plasmas in my household. My sons 4500BFXZA must have WAY over 10K hours on it. My original 4500AFXZA developed some vertical purple lines that would not go away no matter what board I replaced or cables I played with, apparently a failing panel, so I had to replace it a year or so ago.
Replaced it with a used 60" F5300 pentile matrix that I picked up for $50 that had a blown power supply and after replacing and its just a stupendously beautiful set. Same input lag as the F4500s.
These sets have 37ms of input lag (Bseries) and rolling 37-45ms of input lag (A series) per time sleuth readings. Perfectly acceptable still for most gaming IMO.
Its been a long time since I made my gushing F4500 fanboy post back in 2013 or so, lol.
60" F5300 + RT5X + Sega Genesis.
https://i.imgur.com/pH1Gnth.png
That looks really good, the pentile matrix does make it look like a CRT!
I was pleasantly surprised when I hooked up my consoles+OSSC to the Plasma, the good motion clarity on a display this large is something to behold.
https://i.imgur.com/YlNvUj4.jpeg
I recommend Samsung or LG if anyone is interested in using original hardware+line multipliers, these brands play nicely with off-spec signals. My HD Samsung Plasma even accepts 5x@1080p!
Unfortunately the Panasonic's HATE anything but 2x, and only the later models (starting from the 2012 models) output uncompressed 4:4:4 chroma subsampling.
https://junkerhq.net/xrgb/index.php?tit ... patibility
If you still want to use a Panasonic, then a video processor like the DVDO models are necessary to output a proper signal.