Plasma vs. LCD

I’ve been a home theater nut for about a decade now.  I can be blamed (or credited?) for getting a few of my friends hooked as well.  While I’ve invested a lot of time reading about audio and video, and I love to talk about the subject – it is only a hobby.

A fair number of my friends ask me for my opinion when they are considering a new television.  This usually boils down to deciding between which flat panel display.  There are still a few rear projection sets (RPTVs) being sold, but they are on the decline which is a shame since the quality/value balance was generally very good.

Today there are really only 2 mass market options for flat panel displays: Plasma or LCD.  Sure there are OLED sets, but the size/cost rule them out for most situations. Looking forward we see SED and FED technologies on the way, but I wouldn’t hold off on a purchase as there will always be something better coming soon.

Panasonic has a relatively good comparison of Plasma and LCD as they sell both.  I’m not sure I agree entirely with the conclusions they draw, but the data is basically sound.  If we look at the Plasma cross section diagram from Panasonic:

So typical of almost all video display devices, the colour image is made up of red, green and blue.  With Plasma we’ve got effectively one electron gun per colour cell, and 3 of those cells make up one pixel.  If you remember CRTs, we had a single electron gun that scanned the visible surface and excited the phosphor to leave an image.

The LCD cross section from the same source shows how different things are here.  The light source is not an electron gun, but some form of back light.  The same red, green, blue triad is used to represent a single pixel.

Let me now try to focus on some more practical shopping advice.  One key thing to keep in mind is that both technologies are continuing to change (and improve), so what was true a few years ago may not be now.  If we go back a few years, large LCD panels were very expensive – so generally Plasmas had the larger displays locked up.  This has been changing, and LCDs seem to be the more popular display at this point no matter what size.

In terms of resolution – you probably want a native 1920×1080.  I say native, because some displays advertise that they “accept” or are “compatible with” a wide range of resolutions, but actually have some odd ball native panel resolution.  Both technologies were guilty of this, Plasma being more so with 1080p displays which did have 1080 lines but were not 1920 pixels wide.  The only time I’d consider a 1280×720 display was if gaming was your #1 activity, as many games are natively 720p and scaling up to the larger resolution may introduce image artifacts.

You want at least 2 HDMI inputs, and possibly more.  You would like those inputs to be HDMI 1.3a, but there really isn’t an easy way to determine that in some situations – if you are buying a relatively recent model you can safely assume the HDMI level is a non-issue.  Please don’t get fooled into buying expensive HDMI cables – check out the prices at tartancable.com (a 6foot 28AWG cable is $5).

Many LCD displays now have a 120Hz update “feature”.  This is in part to try to address some of the refresh rate issue, but it has also become a way to provide smoother motion.  One caution here is that this is video processing magic – they are interpolating additional frames.  If you watch a lot of live sports (football), this might be a good feature.  If you watch movies, the frame rate you care about is the ability to accept 24fps input and display it without too much conversion.

If you’ve done some comparison shopping already, you may have come across the Pioneer KURO (a Plasma).  It is one of the best flat panel displays out there now.  While the black level is one of the key elements that they push as its benefit (generally Plasmas have better black detail than LCD) the KURO also has very nice colour.  While Plasma doesn’t have the refresh rate issues of LCDs, they do have some image retention issues but most of the current generation are relatively resistant to this.  Plasma panels tend to run a bit hotter than LCDs and many have (quiet) cooling fans.  Also due to details of their construction, they may not be suitable at higher altitudes.

Looking at LCDs, they have Plasma beat for thickness – LCDs will generally have a thinner profile if this matters to you.  LCD panels of the same size, tend to be lighter than the equivalent Plasma.  The black level of an LCD will not match best Plasma panels, but many of you sit in front of LCD monitors all day and are used to this limitation.  Except in extreme cases, LCD will not suffer from burn in issues, as well LCDs run relatively cool and don’t need fans for cooling.

Which one would I buy?  If money were no object, I’d be looking at the KURO.  Of course there are drawbacks to the KURO due to the screen surface being a little delicate.  I’d probably be fairly attracted in general to Plasma displays due to the better black level (having a CRT projector background).  There are some pretty nice LCD displays out there too, I’d consider the Sharp Aquos or Sony Bravia lines.  With either technology there will be an element of “you get what you pay for”, so if you go too cheap you may regret it.  In a similar light, be careful of buying last years model – the technology is changing rapidly and a year does make a difference.

Which one is right for you?  That is something you’ll need to puzzle out for yourself, but I’m happy to field comments and try to help guide people to useful data.

64bit Follow-up

The decision to start including work related items in my blog certainly had a dramatic impact.

Hopefully I’m not a one hit wonder and will never say anthing relevant (or at least link worthy) again.  I remain open to suggestions for content, so if you have questions you think I might be able to answer contact information is available on my About page.

The spike was generated by my posting about 64bit java performance, and this post is a follow up to provide a bit more data on some areas I touched on.

There is some more data on the Sun JDK implementation on the HotSpot wiki.  Based on the recent publish of some SpecJBB2005 results, it seems there is (or will be) a supported version of compressed pointers from Sun.

Of course, the careful observer may noticed that the results are from an x86 based platform.  Does compressed pointer technology only matter on x86 based platforms?  In my original posting I focused on the x86-64 architecture and the benefits (and pitfalls) it brought to applications.  In brief, by moving to 64bits the gain was both bigger and more registers.  If we look at Sparc or POWER CPUs – these were both created with an eye on 64bit implementations, and thus the move to 64bits had less of an impact on the instruction set or register width.  This means that for these systems, 64bit support results in more data (due to pointer size doubling) to move without any real benefit in terms of instruction set (read: code optimization).

Currently I believe Sun has only implemented their compressed pointer solution on x86-64 systems.  There is no strong technical reason preventing it from being done on a Sparc system, but as I pointed out above the benefit may be harder to realize.  The IBM Java6 JDK supports compressed pointers on POWER (AIX/Linux) and there is a measurable improvement on memory intensive benchmarks.  IBM also supports this feature on zSeries (yup, the mainframe) and the following graph shows how the 64bit environment nearly matches the performance of the 31bit environment under Linux.

The -Xlp option is used to configure the IBM JDK to use ‘large pages’ to allocate the heap.  The details about large page support I’ll save for a future posting.   

So while most of the excitement around Java performance on 64bit systems is focused on x86-64, it is worth considering on other architectures.   I believe this will become more important as java applications continue to grow and start hitting the limits of the 32bit address space, forcing a move to 64bit.

Samsung ML-2010 Toner Refill

In the fall of 2005 laser printers had fallen to the near $100 mark and our ink jet printer seemed to have an endless appetite for (expensive) ink cartridges.  It was time for a change, and while colour printing is nice – a lot of our printing needs were very basic.  At the time, staples.ca had multiple web coupons you could “stack” and cut a $199 printer down to $126, and there was a $30 mail in rebate on top of that.  I never got the mail in rebate due to the standard rebate avoidance techniques (by the time I found out what I needed months later, the box had gone into the trash).

The printer I bought was the Samsung ML-2010.  It was known to be easy to refill, and considering that a new toner cartridge was nearly $100 at the time – I knew I’d be going the DIY route when the time came.  A full 3 years later we still use this printer and it has been mostly trouble free.  The toner had finally gotten low enough that we needed to do something (taking the cartridge out and shaking it wasn’t helping much anymore).

I figured I’d be getting one of the toner refill kits from eBay, but which one?  I turned to redflagdeals.com and found this thread that pointed me at TonerKits.  While the thread was started back in 2004, but its still going strong at 47 pages with recent positive reports.  I purchased from TonerKits via eBay simply selected the right kit for my printer.  I paid $11.99 USD (7.99 + 4 shipping), but looking today – the same kit is $9.99 with free shipping.  The eBay transaction was quick, and smooth.

Refill Kit Includes:
1 – 100g black toner refill
1 – pouring spout w/cap
1 – set illustrated instructions

(there are cheaper kits with less toner, 100g will fill to ~75% level twice)

Pictured above is my toner cartridge and the 3 items I received from TonerKits.  The refill process was very simple. Continue reading “Samsung ML-2010 Toner Refill”