A Plasma TV can show the darkest of blacks making it ideal when watching a film or programme with a lot of dark scenes. Plasma screens can achieve really dark blacks because they can turn off individual plasma cells making the resulting pixel very dark, the problem with LCD screens is they use a fluorescent back light which can never be turned off, thus resulting in not so dark blacks.
This is the measurement of the ratio between the brightest white and the darkest black that the set is able to produce, the problem is there are different ways to measure contrast ratio leading to varying results.
L CD TVs use a backlight that can deliver very high levels of white, this means that they don't have to display very dark blacks to achieve a high contrast ratio.
Plasma screens are ideal at showing high motion scenes compared with LCD screens, this is because plasma TVs can achieve very good refresh rates. Refresh rate is the time it takes a pixel to go from black to white and back to black, in other words from on to off and back on again.
LCD screens call this process response time which again is the time taken for a pixel to go from black to white and back to black, this is hard to achieve with liquid crystal displays thus resulting in a smearing effect making the picture look blurred.
In actual fact even the best plasma TVs are not as good at refreshing the screen as the older CRT TV were.
Every plasma cell is capable of making a high range of colours, resulting in superb natural colour tones, this makes the viewing of peoples skin look very natural.
Plasma usually wins when it comes to the bigger screen sizes, anything over about 42" is normally better to go with a plasma although LCD screens are achieving bigger sizes.
Plasma screens claim they can be viewed from an angle of 160° where as LCD screens although claimed to achieve viewing angles up to 170° the picture quality deteriorates once past an angle of 75° compared to a plasma at the same angle.
One of the problems with Plasma TVs is screen burn, this occurs when a part of the screen is left showing a particularly bright image such as a logo or channel name for long periods of time. Even after changing channels the logo will remain on the screen.
Plasma screens tend to be a lot heavier than their LCD counterparts, this could be an issue if hanging the TV on a wall. We would recommend using the manufacturers wall bracket and if in doubt have a tradesmen fit the TV for you.
Plasma screens are not usually good at showing computer graphics compared with LCD screens. If you are using your TV extensively as a computer monitor we would recommend an LCD screen.