LCD and Plasma monitor - Whats the difference?

Difference in technology.... First the LCD: LCD is Liquid Crystal Display. In a LCD panel, each pixel(each dot) of light that you see comes from liquid crystal molecules that are sandwiched between two transparent electrodes. A TFT(Thin Film Transistor) matrix is used to supply charge to each pixel. This voltage level decides the amount of light the liquid crystal molecules will pass through it. It is the combination of these 3 colors that give a pixel it's color. Actually in color LCDs each pixel consists of 3 sub pixels one each for red, white and black. The voltage level to each sub-pixel is varied according to the intensity of that color. It is the combination of these 3 colors that give a pixel it's color. For example, if a pixel should appear red, only the red sub-pixel will be turned on with full intensity and others will be off. One thing to note is that these crystal molecules itself do not emit light. It only filters out the required light from the back light i.e. LCDs will have a constant white light behind the LCD matrix. Plasma: The plasma is the latest technology in flat displays. Here, each sub-pixel is, say, gas inside a phosphor coated box. Gas is either neon or xenon. The property of this gas is that when they are charged, it emits energy in the form of invisible photons and property of phosphorus is that they emit light when exposed to other lights. The charge supplied to the gas decides the intensity of invisible light the gas emits. Now, these invisible light photons from charged gas fall on the phosphor coat and the phosphor coat emits visible light. The phosphor coat decides the color of the pixel. So, a red sub-pixel's phosphor coat will have such phosphor that emits only red light when invisible light hits it. So here, a back light is not needed as each pixel itself produces the light. Difference for end user... The one who goes to buy a monitor or tv would only like to know about the quality of picture that he/she will see and not the working. Both technologies have its own pros and cons. Some important ones are: 1) Contrast is better in plasma than in LCD This is because in LCDs liquid crystal do not actually stop all the light from passing through a black pixel. So, black is actually a but faint. 2) Plasmas have better viewing angles. LCDs will look different(colors get distorted) from different angles. 3) Plasma have a problem that if a bright image is constantly displayed on it for long time, say for hours, there are chances that the image gets imprinted on the screen. This is called burn-in. Burn-in may temporary or permanent. Although latest plasma monitors suffer less burn-ins, there are chances. LCDs also suffer burn-ins but only in extreme situations say if very bright still images for few days. Any doubts are welcomed.... Bye...

Plasma screens --------------- Plasma pictures are made up of individual pixels, each one of which sits at the front of a tiny chamber filed with gas (a mixture of neon and xenon). At the front of each of these chambers are phosphors, at the rear of each chamber is an electrical source. This electrical source is used to ionise the chamber's gas generating unltraviolet light which excites the phosphors into glowing in the way required by the picture. There are three sub-pixels; red, green and blue - for each plasma dot, giving you a potentially emormous pallette of colours. Reasons to buy a Plasma? ------------------------- Grey scale response / contrast - Plasma technology can deliver superior subleties - which means plasmas can generally give you more detail in dark picture areas. Response Times - Response time is the amount of time, measured in milliseconds, that it takes for a pixel to go from inactive to active and back again. Athough the latest LCD screens have made big improvements in this area, plasma is still considerably better, so its picture quality generally suffers less. Size - LCD is catching up, but it's still cheaper for manufacturers to use Plasma for really big screen sizes - certainly 42in and above - than it is for them to use LCD. On the other hand, plasma isn't really viable at sizes smaller than 32in. Viewing Angle - LCD screens frequently boast viewing angles of anywhere upto 175 degrees. Pretty much all plasma screens, on the other hand, retain their quality upto around 160 degrees. Colour Saturation - Plasma traditionally scores high here because of the way it blocks light, turning off pixels when they're not needed so that no stray light can dilute its coulours. With LCD there's always smoe stray light in the mechanism, which adds a greying influence to colours thus makes authentic tones more difficult to see. LCD screens ----------- A liquid containing individually controlable crystals is suspended between two transparent panels, and when these crystals are activated by voltage , they align themselves so that they either allow a certain amount of light (produced by a fluorescent tube behind the panel) to pass through the panel, or else block it off. Both the lit and unlit crystals create visible pixels that together compose the final image on the screen. Reasons to buy an LCD? ----------------------- Screen life - LCD can last twice as long as plasma (around 40 years at 4hrs a day versus 20 years at 4hrs of use a day). No screenburn - Plasma screens are suspectible to something called screenburn, which occurs when a bright image, like the sky news logo, is displayed on screen for an extended period of time. The constant saturation 'tires' plasma's phosphors, leaving a permanent shadow of the bright image behind. LCD technology is pretty much immune to this problem. Slimness - Because there is no need for gas filled or heavy glass fronts in a LCD screen, LCDs tend to be slimmer and lighter than plasmas. Brightness - LCD technology can generally deliver brighter pictures than a plasma - though more brightness isn't automatically better if it is used to disguise a lack of contrast. Power consumption - LCDs generally use less power than plasma TVs because they dont need to power hundreds of electrodes to stimulate phosphors.

As far as my knowledge goes, there is no Plasma monitors available and only LCD monitors are available.

Plasma and LCD TVs are the latest trend in home entertainment. Both offer unrivalled picture quality and resolution, while doing away with the bulkiness of the older rear-projection technologies. But with all of the hype surrounding these two types of televisions, what is the difference between them? Although they look- and are virtually priced- the same, they are not. There differences are found in the way in which they display their pictures. Plasma TV technology is made up of hundreds of thousands of little pixels, each capable of displaying red, green, and blue colors. A plasma monitor often consists of two panels, which are filled with an inert gas, such as xenon or neon. When the pixels are excited by pulses of electricity, the gas becomes liquid, thus generating light. This light in turn then illuminates the pixels, causing them to display the appropriate color to form a picture. LCD panels function in a very similar manner. A panel of thin-film-transmitters, or TFT, sends electricity to cells filled with liquid crystal. When the cells are struck by the electricity, the liquid crystals allow light to filter through. Unlike the pixels found in plasma TVs, LCD monitors create color by blocking out the appropriate wavelengths from white light.