Energy use

Why does it matter?
With environmental and green issues becoming increasingly important, it’s reassuring to know that your choice of large screen TV is ecologically sound.

Myth
Plasma TVs use more power than their LCD rivals.

Fact
The reality is that plasma TVs don’t necessarily use any more power than LCDs – a fact which makes perfect sense if you think about how each technology works.

Plasma TVs, for instance, require just a single ignition of a plasma cell to cause a pixel to illuminate. Since darkness is achieved in plasma pixels by stopping electrical current getting into them, it follows that plasma TVs need relatively little power to reproduce dark scenes.

LCDs by comparison run at a constant power regardless of whether a scene is dark or light, due to their use of an always-on backlight.

Results from an independent research conducted by the AVT.O.P. Messetechnik laboratory in Germany, showed that plasmas tend to use the same – and sometimes less – amounts of power than LCD screens.

Plasma – Individually controlled light sources mean the power consumption varies according to the brightness of each scene

LCD – Backlight is constantly on for both bright and dark scenes


Example
You decide to watch a DVD of The Lord of The Rings. If you have an LCD TV, even though the film contains some a wide mix of dark and bright scenes, the TV will run at a constant ‘mid-level’ power, since its backlight output remains unchanged regardless of how dark the image content is.

If you watch the same film on a plasma TV, during bright scenes it will use potentially more energy than an LCD TV. But during the dark scenes it will use less energy than the LCD TV. The result is that the overall energy usage between the TVs is roughly the same. In fact, with a really dark movie, plasma TVs could use notably less power than many LCD TVs!