A flat panel television that cost several thousand dollars two Christmases ago is being sold this month at a price that would have seemed like a misprint, and the manufacturers are not enjoying it nearly as much as the customers are.
The collapse has been faster than anybody in the industry planned for. Panel capacity came online in Korea, Japan and Taiwan simultaneously, all of it committed years in advance on the assumption that demand would grow into it, and demand grew more slowly than the glass did. The result is a commodity market in a product everybody was still treating as a premium purchase. Once that happens the price only goes one way.
Plasma against LCD is the argument in every shop and the answer is becoming boring. Plasma still wins on black levels and on motion, which means it is the better television for watching films and for anything with fast movement across the screen. LCD wins on brightness in a lit room, on power consumption, on weight, and on the manufacturing curve, which is the one that decides these things. Plasma is the better display and it is losing, because the industry can make LCD panels cheaper every quarter and the customer standing in a bright showroom sees the brighter picture.
The name I would watch is Vizio, which almost nobody outside the US has heard of and which is quietly demonstrating that this category no longer requires you to be a Japanese electronics conglomerate. Buy panels on the open market, put them in a box, sell through warehouse clubs, spend nothing on brand. The sets are not as good. They are also several hundred dollars cheaper, and it turns out that a lot of people looking at two large televisions in a shop cannot tell you which one has better uniformity and can absolutely tell you which one costs less.
What makes the whole thing slightly absurd is the content situation. People are buying high definition displays in enormous numbers to watch material that is not in high definition. Broadcast HD is patchy, most cable subscribers are getting an upscaled standard definition picture through a set top box that is not helping, and the disc formats that would fix this are stuck in a war neither side is winning. The single best source of high definition material in most households this Christmas is a games console.
Which is a genuinely strange outcome and one worth sitting with. Sony has attached a Blu-ray drive to a console and Microsoft is selling an add-on drive for the other format, and between them they are doing more to put HD content into living rooms than the entire broadcast industry.
The analogue shutdown scheduled for early 2009 is the deadline hanging over all of it, and it is going to arrive with a large number of households still owning televisions that stop working and no clear plan for telling them. That is a policy problem rather than a technology one, and policy problems in consumer electronics tend to get solved badly and late.
If you are buying this month, buy the largest panel you can accommodate rather than the highest specification, ignore 1080p unless you already own a source that produces it, and do not pay extra for a brand on a display technology that will be cheaper again by spring. The one thing I would spend money on is the sound, because every flat panel sold this year has terrible speakers and nobody mentions it in the shop.