If you are looking for a new cheap LCD TV or cheap plasma TV and you are going to use it a lot for gaming which do you choose, LCD or plasma? This can be a difficult choice, however if you allow for some of the big differences between the two you can decide which will suite your gaming needs the most.
The first thing to look at is overall picture quality which boils down to three things, colour, contrast and fast moving video playback. For colour, the advantage goes to plasma in normal lighting conditions, however in high light conditions the advantage swings back to LCD. Contrast is the difference between the brightest white and the darkest black and once again plasma has the advantage as it does not fade in the same way as LCD. For fast moving video Plasma wins once again as LCD screens have a slight lag when there is a very high frame rate.
The next area to consider is viewing angles; you may have noticed that colours and glare affect the picture quality dependant on the angle at which you are viewing the screen. This problem has been greatly reduced in recent time with Plasma screens featuring a 160 degree viewing angle and LCD screens are at 90 degrees. This means that the picture will not change as long as you are sitting within 160 degrees for plasma TV’s and 90 degrees for LCD TV’s.
The last thing to consider is screen burn which refers to the permanent etching of an image onto the TV screen; this can happen if a still image is displayed for more than ten minutes. This problem mainly happens with plasma TV’s rather than LCD TV’s as the glass element is more likely to burn.