Panasonic Announces an End To Plasma TVs In March

An anonymous reader writes "You thought Halloween was for treats. Not this time. Panasonic announced to its investors today that its plasma TV business would be over by the end of March 2014." Blacker blacks and brighter whites aside, there are some good reasons for the shift.

Re:Because of the Limited Lifespan?

[CastrTroy]

50,000 hours at 10 hours a day is 13.7 years. I certainly don't watch 10 hours of TV a day. Probably maxes out most days around 4, meaning that the TV would last me about 34 years. Assuming something else didn't break first. 50,000 hours is quite a long time.

Re:Because of the Limited Lifespan?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that 50,000 hours is over 5 years of non-stop use. Even if the set was on for 12 hours a day, that's still over 11 years.

Also, that 50,000 hour count was not the "lifespan", but the half-life of the phosphors. Meaning after 50,000 hours of operation the screen would be half as bright as when new.

Know what else uses phosphors with a half-life? The back-light of the LCD panels you've bought up until the last couple years (LEDs also have a brightness half-life, so it still applies).

Good job being misled.

Re:Because of the Limited Lifespan?

[hairyfish]

They're playing down the burn in issue, "[Burn-in] is a real issue, but it actually takes much longer use than any normal person would watch a single image". Our cable provider puts a square box at the bottom of the screen with channel info in it every time you change channels. I've had my plasma about 8 years and it has the shadow of that box burnt into it.

Re:Betamax

[JDG1980]

I need to download the comments to this story and do a find/replace on "Plasma" and "Plasma TV" and replace it with Betamax and see how it reads.

I really don't understand how Betamax came to become one of the canonical examples of a superior technology brought down by a lesser competitor.

In its original form, Betamax was not appreciably superior to VHS in terms of resolution. The difference was maybe 5%-10% at most. A videophile might notice the difference, especially if he had an expensive Trinitron set, but the average viewer watching the tapes on an average TV set would not.

On the other hand, VHS was clearly superior to Betamax in one way that many consumers cared about a great deal: runtime. Remember that when home VCRs were first released, a blank cassette could cost $20 or more (and I'm not even adjusting for inflation). The earliest Betamax units could only get 1 hour out of a standard L-500 tape. In contrast, VHS started at 2 hours on the typical T-120 tape. Both formats eventually added extra modes which allowed more runtime in exchange for a slight loss of quality, and most consumers used these modes as soon as they were available. When the dust had settled, Betamax only managed to get up to 4.5 hours on the longest mode (Sony had also increased the standard tape length by 50%). VHS, in contrast, got up to 6 hours on EP mode on a standard tape.

Add to that the licensing issues (JVC licensed VHS to pretty much anyone who wanted it, while Sony was much more jealous about their format), and it's not at all surprising that VHS won. It wasn't about the marketing, it was that VHS offered a better cost/benefit ratio to the average viewer.