The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300

The next big thing was supposed to be Field Emission Displays. Microscopic electron guns directly behind each phosphor. The big manufacturers experimented and tried getting it commercialized for decades, then pretty much gave up in the 2000s when LCDs got stupid cheap.

https://www.engineersgarage.com/field-emission-display/

There was also a brief reign of plasma TVs in-between, now almost a forgotten technology

A good 720p plasma is still a great display to this day.

I have the second to last generation Panasonic plasmas. 42" 1080p display. At first the picture was amazing but over time it degraded slightly with what looks like subtle noise affecting the entire display. Solid colors have a faint shimmer of noise in them. As if white noise was blended with everything.

I still use it as a bedroom TV. I can barely lift it myself and it claims to use 450watts of power. It's certainly a lot. It's notably warm near it and will heat my room if I don't open the door.

Still the picture quality is very good at a distance. Only oled or micro led displays look better.

This could be that you just noticed it? Panasonic plasma cells brightness is controlled by PWM off a 600 Hz carrier (it's even proudly advertised as "600 Hz!" on the TV box and stickers). While the number is quite big and stands out nicely against "240 Hz" advertised as refresh rate for the competing LCD TVs, it did not provide many different brightness levels per pixel (keep in mind that it's divided by 60 Hz or higher frame refresh) so those TVs were running temporal stochastic dithering to create more levels. If you looked closely at a new plasma TV screen it was very noisy with random pixels firing up at high frequency.

The heat! Many plasma displays had a faint heat you would feel on your face if you were near that I found uncomfortable. I am not sure if others felt the same.

I have an HD plasma and it is fantastic. It is the very best living room display I have owned.

Like the CRT, it has glowing phosphors in a tube. Unlike the CRT, it is pixel addressable, where the CRT is basically not addressable, or maybe just field, frame and or line addressable. Of course the tradeoffs are well known. Resolution scaling on a CRT is rarely an issue, except when the dot mask is too coarse. It still looks great. It can be a major issue with pixel addressable displays, when uneven multiples are in play.

In my experience, a good plasma is right there with the CRT on color gamut and contrast, even does well on speed. Or can. Mine is 120Hz and does not lag more than a CRT does on 60Hz signals.

(If you want a fast one, get one of the 3D capable TV sets from that era. They have fast video processors and basically can run at least double the necessary frame rate. And if you have an nVidia GPU and good CAD software, you can even use one as a wall sized 3D display featuring a bunch of things an ordinary set will struggle with and large assembly visualization as well as technical surfacing being two use cases I found amazing.)

AMOLED looks like it may be the next plasma. I have one from Waveshare that is 10.5" and has 2560x1600 resolution. I wish it were bigger. It is fantastic! It has a much higher DPI than my plasma does and appears to not require a PWM cycling of pixels to get those hard to hit grey levels.

I am learning I like displays where the light is not filtered down to a color, instead is just emitted at the color. Micro LED could be another contender if they can get the dot pitch high enough.

All that said, I keep a few CRT displays. I really like them for retro computing and gaming.

Despite its benefits over LCDs, it had no chance to compete on price. LCD prices just plummeted to far too fast.

OLED is the current equivalent (with perhaps QLED) and micro LED on the horizon.

I remember the heat.

I had a year of sickness, or so, back in the day. I decided I was gonna blow as much money as I could on the "best" TV setup. I bought a 42" plasma TV, and I sat it on the floor in my living room, in front of a window.

You could see the heat-haze above the screen, the air shimmering in front of the window, after it had been on for a while.

Lovely display, far too expensive, and far far too heavy, but for the five+ years I kept it I think I got my money's worth.

microLED is the next plasma, with tiny non-organic LEDs. Organic LEDs have some problems with color gamut and (AFAIR) response time that make them inferior to plasma, whereas microLED, while still exotic, is being rapidly developed.

I've even worked on a color science-related project that attempted to use LG OLED TV as a poor man's reference display, and turns out they use a lot of tricks like dithering, heavy power limiting and low brightness resolution for each subpixel that make them look bad when pixel-peeping.

Ahhh, thanks for that. microLED was my first hope, until the AMOLED tech seemed to fill the gap for the smaller, high DPI, display use case at least. Nice to see the rapid dev going on.

Are there differences between OLED sources? I'm using Samsung AMOLED displays at present. I don't have access to an LG.

Do you have any thoughts on DPI for microLED?

I will definitely poke at the displays I have more to see what I can learn.

Sorry, cannot answer these questions competently. From my understanding, LG has monopoly on TV-scale OLED displays, so others big players in premium TV market (Sony and Samsung come to mind) bet on productizing uLED.

The level of noise went up dramatically after the first year. I read that this is part of the panel aging. It hasn't gotten worse since then. My two biggest gripes are high brightness areas don't work on large portions of the screen. A windows file browser is basically unusable.

The heat is probably what will eventually get me to replace it.

Well you improved my own lacking understanding, and with exemplary form. It is rare to see others share what you did. Thanks again.

The problem with MicroLED is that they remain very expensive to produce, so they may have no chance to compete on price, and the quality of OLED is getting better as well. Apple recently abandoned their MicroLED plans: https://www.yolegroup.com/strategy-insights/did-apple-just-k...

Yeah, and we can’t make them small enough either. But it seems like the probable next big thing to me. Just gotta solve some issues.

The death knell was that they couldn’t shrink the plasma cells enough to support 4K. LCD didn’t kill it, in the same sense that LCD doesn’t kill OLED.

I had a Zenith 42" plasma (maybe Zenith Z42PX2D?) for about 10 years before the screen became insanely noisy and LG OLEDs hit the market. Really an amazing display though, at "tv distance" (6 to 8ft) the 852x480 resolution was not at all noticeable as "low resolution".

What I actually found was dog-shit quality video looked AMAZING on it, as did downsampled high-res video -- I had a media center pc hooked up via DVI, and off it went.

I replaced it with a 1080p 55" OLED in 2014 or 15 when it became unwatchable, and it's been incredible as well aside from very rare, short instances of judder.. As per my Zenith experience above, I figured lower-res (not 4k) would be better in the long run.

Curious to see how long it lasts, but it's still very bright and very good almost a decade later, no burn-in, no dead pixels, and it's on constantly.

But FED was also better than LCD, and it was still abandoned because of cost. The same thing could happen with MicroLED.

> it claims to use 450watts of power.

I've still got a 42 inch GT60 plasma and while it certainly runs hot it's pulling about 140W on average so it's no space heater. It's become a bit more noisy, but not in a way that impacts viewing for me. After a while you don't see it anymore just like film grain...