One of my dreams for our home is to have a home theater system. As I’ve mentioned before, our family are huge movie buffs and couch potatoes. We can watch TV all day – having a home theater will be a great experience for us!

I just do not which one would be better – a plasma LCD TV or a HD TV. I’ve read many home theater buying guides and found out the ff:

LCD HDTVs work by shining a light behind an LCD panel made up of a fixed number
of pixels. Each pixel is either red, blue or green and is switched on or off when a
voltage is applied to it. When voltage is applied to a pixel, it is switched off,
meaning that light can’t shine through it.

The main advantage of LCD vs plasma HDTV is that LCD panels don’t suffer from
what’s called burn-in. This is a feature of plasma TVs where they are used to watch
TV stations with logos permanently displayed on-screen or where they are used for
video gaming with games that have static images such as a cockpit on flight
simulators. The image literally ‘burns-in’ the screen meaning that even when the
image is not present you can still see a faint trace of it on screen. So for video
gamers in particular, LCD is a better choice than plasma.

Plasma HDTVs have over a million chambers which house one or a combination of
gasses. When a voltage is applied to one of these chambers the gas ionizes and
emits ultra-violet light. This light strikes red, green or plue phophors coated on the
inside of the chamber and a pixel emits this color light.

Plasma HDTVs tend to have better contrast than LCDs because, even when a pixel
on an LCD panel is switched off it doesn’t block all the light coming through and
therefore the pixel isn’t completely black. Plasma HDTVs also tend to have a wider
viewing angle than LCDs, as on LCD HDTVs the contrast and colour of the image can change when the screen is viewed from different angles.

It is safe to say that plasma TVs are the choice for screens 40 inches or less but as new technology comes in, this is bound to change!