Comment by joezydeco

2 years ago

The next big thing was supposed to be Field Emission Displays. Microscopic electron guns directly behind each phosphor. The big manufacturers experimented and tried getting it commercialized for decades, then pretty much gave up in the 2000s when LCDs got stupid cheap.

https://www.engineersgarage.com/field-emission-display/

19 comments

joezydeco

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Gare  2 years ago

There was also a brief reign of plasma TVs in-between, now almost a forgotten technology

  • ddingus  2 years ago

    I have an HD plasma and it is fantastic. It is the very best living room display I have owned.

    Like the CRT, it has glowing phosphors in a tube. Unlike the CRT, it is pixel addressable, where the CRT is basically not addressable, or maybe just field, frame and or line addressable. Of course the tradeoffs are well known. Resolution scaling on a CRT is rarely an issue, except when the dot mask is too coarse. It still looks great. It can be a major issue with pixel addressable displays, when uneven multiples are in play.

    In my experience, a good plasma is right there with the CRT on color gamut and contrast, even does well on speed. Or can. Mine is 120Hz and does not lag more than a CRT does on 60Hz signals.

    (If you want a fast one, get one of the 3D capable TV sets from that era. They have fast video processors and basically can run at least double the necessary frame rate. And if you have an nVidia GPU and good CAD software, you can even use one as a wall sized 3D display featuring a bunch of things an ordinary set will struggle with and large assembly visualization as well as technical surfacing being two use cases I found amazing.)

    AMOLED looks like it may be the next plasma. I have one from Waveshare that is 10.5" and has 2560x1600 resolution. I wish it were bigger. It is fantastic! It has a much higher DPI than my plasma does and appears to not require a PWM cycling of pixels to get those hard to hit grey levels.

    I am learning I like displays where the light is not filtered down to a color, instead is just emitted at the color. Micro LED could be another contender if they can get the dot pitch high enough.

    All that said, I keep a few CRT displays. I really like them for retro computing and gaming.

    • ansgri  2 years ago

      microLED is the next plasma, with tiny non-organic LEDs. Organic LEDs have some problems with color gamut and (AFAIR) response time that make them inferior to plasma, whereas microLED, while still exotic, is being rapidly developed.

      I've even worked on a color science-related project that attempted to use LG OLED TV as a poor man's reference display, and turns out they use a lot of tricks like dithering, heavy power limiting and low brightness resolution for each subpixel that make them look bad when pixel-peeping.

      3 replies →

  • floam  2 years ago

    A good 720p plasma is still a great display to this day.

    • phibz  2 years ago

      I have the second to last generation Panasonic plasmas. 42" 1080p display. At first the picture was amazing but over time it degraded slightly with what looks like subtle noise affecting the entire display. Solid colors have a faint shimmer of noise in them. As if white noise was blended with everything.

      I still use it as a bedroom TV. I can barely lift it myself and it claims to use 450watts of power. It's certainly a lot. It's notably warm near it and will heat my room if I don't open the door.

      Still the picture quality is very good at a distance. Only oled or micro led displays look better.

      6 replies →

  • MBCook  2 years ago

    Despite its benefits over LCDs, it had no chance to compete on price. LCD prices just plummeted to far too fast.

    OLED is the current equivalent (with perhaps QLED) and micro LED on the horizon.