LCD is winning because shops are too bright

A year ago at CES I noted in passing that plasma still beat LCD on black level and on motion, and that this was hard to sell because it does not fit on a shelf label. Twelve months on, plasma still wins on both counts, and LCD has taken the market decisively.

The technology losing on picture quality is winning on sales, and I think the explanation is almost entirely about the room where people decide.

Walk into any electronics shop. The lighting is fierce, deliberately so, because bright shops sell more of everything. Thirty televisions are lined up on a wall showing the same demonstration loop, usually something with tropical fish or a helicopter shot of a canyon, chosen because it is colourful and moves smoothly.

Under those conditions LCD looks better, and it is not close. LCD panels go brighter, and brightness is what survives ambient light. Plasma’s advantage is how deep the blacks go, and in a shop flooded with overhead lighting there are no blacks to speak of. The screen that would look extraordinary in a dim living room at nine in the evening looks flat and slightly grey next to the one beside it.

So people buy the set that looked better in the shop, take it home, and put it in a room that is nothing like the shop.

The manufacturers know this perfectly well and there is a standard response, which is that every set ships in a mode with the brightness and the colour pushed far past anything sensible. It exists to win the wall. The first thing anyone should do with a new television is turn all of that down, and almost nobody does, so a great many people are watching a badly configured picture for the life of the set.

There is a second thing keeping plasma down and it is a reputation that has outlived the fact. Early panels could retain a static image if you left a channel logo in one corner for long enough. Current sets have pixel-shifting and much improved phosphors and the problem is largely gone. Try telling that to someone who read about it in 2004. Reputations in consumer electronics decay far more slowly than the defects that created them.

LCD is also improving. The higher refresh panels arriving this year genuinely help with motion, which was the more visible of plasma’s two advantages, and the gap will keep narrowing because far more money is being spent on it.

Which is the ordinary way these things go. The better technology does not lose because it was worse. It loses because it was judged in the wrong lighting, and because volume buys improvement and the other one had the volume.