Great rabbit hole video, love learning about stuff I didn't know I was interested in. Came for the room setup but all your videos are great, Keep it up !
My inlaws had a plasma in their bedroom. They're pretty well off and were early adopters. I was shocked by how hot and heavy it was. The fan was also very audible.
9:00 I worked at Sears in electronics when HD widescreen CRTs were a thing. It took me and three other guys to get a 34" Sony widescreen CRT to get it on a shelf 5 foot high. The door to the stockroom was too short to get the forklift otherwise we would have. Fun fact, I accidently broke one of the first LCD TVs we got: a 19", I want to say Zenith? with a sale price of around $1,200.
Wow, I didn't even think about how much harder it might be to move one of those beasts in the original box -- adds even more bulk and weight. I wonder how many workers' comp cases ever resulted from them... Breaking that TV sounds like a nightmare day at work. I worked in retail and helped a customer load a TV into his sedan. He wanted it loaded sideways, and I knew this was a bad idea. Sure enough, he showed up later with a broken TV to return.
@@Dreamroom64 The TV was out of the box because it was going on display. As you know, this makes the front very heavy while not having much to grip on the slanted back. Seriously why did no one put handle grips on these heavy TVs!
It's a dream of mine to have one of those too, even though they're using early panel tech. I actually laid eyes on some at an indoor flea market many years ago, roughly 2013. They were powered off, and the seller had two or three of them on a huge rack mount with the panels oriented in a column. He was asking a lot though; I had no money and no way to get one home. I never saw them again.
I did a Facebook marketplace for plasmas. You’re not kidding, a lot of cheap options. I currently don’t have the space but I’m hoping to make it feasible soon because it seems like really cool tech.
Yup, people are unloading them right now and consider them junk. They're basically in the same position that CRTs found themselves 14 years ago. I didn't really have space either, but I'm making it hah.
My grandmother has a panasonic plasma similar to yours, i remember growing up and being blown away by how good it looked!! I usually game on my Panasonic Tau, but this inspired me to try other mediums for my retro collection. Thanks for the video!
I had to sell my 65" plasma because I didn't have space for it and my OLED, my dad still has a 60" plasma and my mom a 40" plasma, I hope to inherit both and find a good place for them.
Interesting, that's actually the OLED model that I have. I may have been too quick to dismiss BFI on it after mediocre experiences using it directly on 60 FPS content. It added a lot of flicker on the highest mode. I have a RetroTINK-4K but haven't expeimented with the high frame modes on it yet. You're saying I could combine this feature with the C1's built-in BFI feature and get a decent result? I also do some 120 FPS PC gaming on it. I'll have to read up on combining this with BFI too.
@@Dreamroom64Blurbusters are saying 480Hz OLED beats plasma in motion clarity. Not sure if BFI is enough for that or if they are talking about CRT filters. Me and my wife are still plasma TV holdouts with 58” 1080p and 42” 720p, which both look excellent still, but thinking I will get a 27” 1440p OLED for my PC gaming setup where I use IPS monitors.
I had c1 .terribly dim and colors washed out .yellows and green loik like puke. When getting oled u want it to pop and c1 does not pop .its also not as good as plasma because plasma has better colors and motion
7:57 I'm curious how does it stack up with oled with black frame insertion [BFI] turned on in settings? I always thought that was the "best" to play retro games.
BFI helps somewhat but is underwhelming from what I can remember the last time I used it on my C1. On "high," it quite noticeably flickers. It inherently dims the picture by inserting black frames, and when you stack the loss of brightness from BFI plus the loss of brightness from applying a simulated scanline or pixel grid filter, it only further dims the picture. And brightness is already a bit of a weakness of OLED TVs. In the end, from my experience, it just doesn't look crispy like a beautiful CRT or plasma. To top it all off, the SDR colors on OLED aren't as natural and pleasing as plasma or CRT. There's just something about those phosphors. RetroTINK-4K can help the whole OLED situation by injecting HDR, but I can say for sure that even with this, I've never seen anything from my C1 that wowed me immediately like my pre-calibration Kuro. I think a good analogy would be to compare a real neon sign vs. a LED "neon" sign. LED "neon" signs look good, but they just don't have the magical look of a true neon sign in darkness. I think OLED has a bright future though, and I still like it nonetheless. I have a 165Hz QD-OLED Alienware monitor and it is seriously impressive for high framerate games, both in terms of motion clarity and stunning colors. The C1 is nice for 120Hz PC gaming. I'm just not sure how well the technology, as it progresses, will work when it comes to adapting to displaying 30-60 FPS SDR content from old consoles. This is why I think it's important that we preserve plasmas before they all go to e-waste facilities. It's such a cheap, accessible way right now to get great performance out of original hardware.
Great video. Subscribed 👍 I have 5 Panasonic plasmas, including 2 720p and 3 1080ps. The best model is the 2010 58 inch THX 3D model, and is the only model that has an option to disable overscan. It also has VGA input and plays very well with the Dreamcast. I also have a Panasonic Tau HD CRT paired with an OSSC to handle line doubling. The overscan can't be disabled even in the service menu and weighs 160lbs, but does look good so I keep it around.
Great video, I never considered a 480p plasma. I need one more display for 4 player system link and I think that is a perfect option. I have 2 CRTs, that’s enough liability for me lol
Thanks! Yeah, the 480p plasmas are easy to overlook and dismiss. It's just tough to find the professional monitors. I think most of the EDTV plasmas (usually how they were marketed) didn't have advanced picture controls to let you properly resize the picture to eliminate overscan. They're still probably pretty neat though and almost completely forgotten today. It's one of those things that is extremely hard to research, so you'll just have to get one that you can find and hope for the best like I did. It's sort of like a treasure hunt.
Hi mate, I have 5 TV’s. A 32 inch Panasonic 720P CRT, a 50 inch Panasonic Plasma, A 54 inch 3D Panasonic Plasma, a 65 inch Sony LED and a 65 inch LG C1 OLED. I’ve owned them all since new. Unfortunately Panasonic TV’s are no longer sold new here in Australia. Not even their OLED. Pricing of Panasonic Plasmas when new here were $3,500 for the 54 inch 3D model. At the time it came with a voucher for a 3D Bluray entertainment system and the 3D Avatar movie which looked amazing on it. I miss 3D movies. Everything is in perfect condition.
I need to get a 480 P plasma I grew up with one, currently I have two plasmas both 1080 P one is 46inch and the other one is a vt60 one of the last made by Panasonic, I daily the VT 60 it’s an amazing set! Something to note is the 46 inch despite also being 1080 P seems to treat 480p better, wonder if there’s a correlation or not. By the way, thanks for the video. I’m glad more people are making videos about plasmas.
Thanks for watching and commenting! Great to hear that you've got a couple going strong. Really rare to hear about someone remembering owning a 480p plasma -- it's almost like they never even existed at this point. I've got two 1080p panels now too, the Kuro PRO-101FD shown and a 42" Panasonic S30. I'll have to experiment with how 480p looks on both, just haven't had a chance yet. Great to hear that it works so well with one of yours. If you get a chance, please let me know the model number on your 46"; I'm curious.
Liked video because you are literally the only other person that agrees with me that a plasma is better than a HD crt. (Definately agree with you alsp that 240p and 480i content is best left to standard def crts)
Still using a Panny P42X1 as out living room TV, coming up on fifteen years this summer. Really want to upgrade soon, but I wonder if I'm being too picky holding out for a 120Hz display.
If you're planning to run a lot of 120 FPS games and HDR content on your next TV, it might be worth upgrading to a good OLED. But if you're mainly displaying SDR, 24/30/60 FPS content you're in good shape sticking with the plasma.
I was an idiot who had an LCD tv back in the 360/ps3 era for the most part, but I smartened up and got a panasonic ST60 as it was the last plasma made by panasonic. Incredible display that was the best I've ever had. I've upgraded to an oled, but still, the 4k/hdr perfect black of my oled feels kinda common, when I was rocking the plasma in 2014 it felt like my TV was soooooo much better than everyone elses (because it was). Really regret passing up on a 480p plasma that I saw for dirt cheap a few years ago now that I know that they have a really good niche use case. I'm frantically searching marketplace but everything is 720p/1080p (and I already own a great 1080 plasma). I really want a 480p one for my ps2/wii!
I still have my 51” Samsung Plasma, it was our main television until 2017, now it sits in one of our rooms, it was just in our game room for a few years, connected to our PS3, XBOX 360, Wii and Blu-Ray Player but never liked the fact that it would run extremely hot, it will Make our summer days even hotter (miserable) and our winters quite pleasant - our plasma now sits unused, some vertical red lines have formed on the screen so more likely will be trashed in a few years if not sooner. I liked plasmas for their price , connectivity options and the 3D feature but hate it for the overheating issues and extremely reflective screen.
I wonder why some seemed to run so hot. I read on a forum post recently that Samsungs in particular seemed to run hotter than other brands. My three Panasonics definitely don't get too hot; two don't even have fans! It probably helps that I don't run them at max brightness. I mainly game at night.
I got my 2010 50inch panasonic last year on FB market have been loving it. Only gripe I have is that it has a grounding whine when it displays bright scenes. Dug up some research and found there’s pcb mount screw kits you can replace on them. Havent taken it apart yet, but we'll see if that resolves the grounding whine.
I noticed that they buzz a bit on bright screens, like the Xbox 360 dashboard, especially my 720p model from 2006. It is normal behavior from what I've read, but I'd like to try to quiet it down a bit if there's such a simple solution. Hopefully that idea works for you. It's a good idea to clean out the accumulated dust inside anyway.
Definitely will keep my eye out on input lag tests, I've been keeping my eye out for a Panasonic Tau HD CRT for my sixth gen consoles because they do have zero input lag on 480p. But if the 480p Plasmas are a good alternative, I might keep my eye out for those.
I'm pretty sure that one of my plasmas will test very well, but we'll see. The Panasonic Tau HD CRT that I had was really nice for 480p, but a big disappointment was how it handled 480i. I used to primarily use it for GameCube and Wii, and this was before the days of me using Swiss to force any GameCube games to 480p. Whenever I'd play a game with only 480i support, it looked terrible. It was pretty disappointing overall. It also didn't support 720p, so it wasn't great for PS3. So if you do ever get one, if it is anything like the one I had, keep these things in mind. 240p content also looked very bad on it, even worse than 480i if I recall correctly. It might be neat to try to take the OSSC to line double a 240p source to 480p, convert back to analog with a lag-free component converter, and see how it looks. It might look really great with this configuration, but the OSSC wasn't around back when I had it.
@Dreamroom64 I already have a Sony Trinitron, which already looks great for 240p and 480i content, so that wouldn't really be a problem for me. The only other thing is, a lot of the games I like are dark. Stuff like Splinter Cell, I dont think would really look great on a plasma, but idk
No, I haven't tried PC gaming on it yet. I just recently got it and didn't take too much time to experiment before pulling the main board for repairs. I'll have it back up and running soon. It supports 1:1 pixel mapping at 1080p, so it would work well connected to a PC. However, you might want to track down a late 1080p Panasonic plasma instead of a Kuro. They're easier to find in good working order. Look for manufacture dates 2011 through 2013 (Panasonic's final year selling plasma TVs). I have one from 2011, and it also supports 1:1 pixel mapping despite being a budget model. Some of the earlier 1080p models may force some overscan. You could compensate for it with your graphic card settings (not ideal) or hope to find a way to disable it in the TV's service menu (risky if you're not super careful). But yeah, a 1080p plasma can be a great choice for PC gaming. It will look way better than playing on an LCD. And like I said in the video, 60 FPS looks awesome on them. You'll be able to max out any game. Just don't leave your taskbar at showing or any other static graphics for several hours repeatedly. Plasmas do best with varied content filling the whole screen.
Still got my 50 inch plasma from 2012 Had to replace the I/O connector board, which was fun to do. Though now every once in a while the whites go crazy when it's first turned on, I want this thing to last so much longer
Hopefully if more people take an interest in plasmas now we'll have better resources to keep them alive over the years. I wish I had the electronics knowledge to really diagnose problems myself and truly understand service manuals.
could never get use to the flicker on PDP's back in the day. sydney trains use to use NEC plasmasync 4:3 displays as next train info boards, they showed up enmass on ebay with burn in like you wouldn't believe
Hah, yeah, plasma really wasn't the right choice for static display boards like that. I guess it was chosen since large LCDs used to be even more expensive or non-existent. I remember seeing some plasma monitors at a train station in the US with severe burn-in too. This was around 2012. Playing around with a surviving 4:3 plasma would be really interesting, but it seems like they're all gone now aside from a few in enthusiasts' hands. Pioneer had a 4:3 model that could handle 240p perfectly without any external scalers.
I don't know all of the technical details well enough yet, but I know that plasmas have no white subpixel like a WOLED. So they produce white wonderfully and uniformly. And unlike an LCD, they're self emissive. Like CRTs, their light comes from phosphors -- it has a distinct look to the colors that is missing from other flat panel display technologies. I think a good analogy that makes sense is how a real neon sign looks vs. a neon-style LED sign. Both look good, but there's a little something extra special about the glow and colors of real neon in a dark place compared to the copycat. The LED signs are cheaper, brighter, and more energy efficient... but they are missing the magic that real neon has.
@@Dreamroom64 I wish I had gotten a Viera plasma when they were nearing their end, instead of going with LCD. I can't remember what made me change my decision. I think the LCD for the same price was 1080p and the plasma was 720p-ish. I'd like to see one in person sometime, but probably not enough to pick one up as I already have too much stuff... OLED looks pretty good to me though, the one I have, so i'll stick with that
You briefly showed 480i in the montage, and I was interested in hearing your thoughts regarding this on a plasma since ultimately you still have to deinterlace the image and I feel these older algorithms would show a lot of combing under motion (compared to a retrotink 4k at least)
On my 2003 model 480p plasma (TH-37PW5), the deinterlacing is somehow amazing. It seriously looks like a progressive scan image to me in motion or still. I've read on one forum post that someone who has this model (42" version) and compared it to a similar commercial model from a few years later noticed a decrease in the deinterlacing quality for motion. Maybe Panasonic really focused on it for this particular generation. I think it has higher lag for 480i though than 480p/720p handling, which I'll test soon with a Time Sleuth. I didn't do too much testing on the 720p model since I didn't like how oversaturated its colors were for SD content. But from what I briefly remember (and that one quick PaRappa the Rapper 2 clip on that set), it performed well at deinterlacing. I'll test input lag on this one too for various resolutions.
I have a Panasonic industrial 50" plasma ands it's awesome with my PS3. It's a 1080p panel also. Had it from new. Does have fans but you don't hear them when it's in use.
Awesome, the industrial monitors are so cool and underappreciated. I wish that it were easier to track them down these days and research the capabilities of each model. They were built like tanks.
@@Dreamroom64 Your right about it being a tank, my model is the TH-50PF10UK it has identical carry handles to the one you have. I love with mine I can pull out the board and change the connections type as needed. The reason I got it back in the day as it could take PAL and NTSC signals and I didn't even start using it for gaming at first it was purchased for home cinema use and was for DVD and LaserDisc playback, now its become my retro gaming display.
I have 2 hd crts im currently using. One is a super fine pitch, sony, it's calibrated and looks great. I've been thinking about getting a plasma for some time, just to try it out.
Good question! My favorite spray cleaner is Sprayway. Though it isn't officially marketed as a screen cleaner, it has worked perfectly for me. It's marketed as a glass cleaner but isn't harsh like Windex. I use the regular kind with a blue cap. I've used it on my Alienware OLED monitor (has a special coating), a Panasonic S30 plasma, and my arcade machine's monitor without any issues. I actually discovered that it's good for screens since the arcade machine company recommended it for wiping smudges from the game's touch screen. It leaves no streaks and comes in a large spray can. It's available at most big box stores, like Home Depot for a few dollars. Just spray it onto a clean microfiber rag and wipe. Other than this product, I've used some old flat panel TV cleaner spray that I got from a defunct brand that is no longer on the market. Since you'd be cleaning your plasma for the first time, I'd recommend hitting the screen with some compressed air if there are any dust/debris chunks. You definitely wouldn't want to grind those over the screen when wiping.
Oh yeah, supposedly the Panasonic VX300 (professional display) is a 1080p 120hz 10bit monitor. I wish I could see a plasma running games in 120hz. But the smallest size is 65”. 😅
I got an lg 42 inch 768p plasma manufactured in may 2011 it's great condition condition I got it for free from my previous apartment owner the only issue it has is 1 out of the 2 hdmi port is not working but other than that it has no issues. I mainly use it with my steam deck it looks great when I display games at 900p I finished red dead 2 on it it had great colors, contrast , and motion clarity it also great for horror games because of the black levels.
Glad to hear it's working so well for you aside from that HDMI port -- not too much of an issue with how cheap and reliable automatic HDMI switches have become. I have a plasma from 2011 as well, and yeah, the black levels really improved by that time. Steam Deck sounds like a good use case for sure.
Thanks for sharing, I have 2 plasmas, Panasonic 768p and 1080p, they are great. One question, have you plugged in ps3 and Xbox360 to 480p plasma? If so, do you think it looks decent?
Yup, 720p games including PS3 and 360 look very good on my 480p plasma. The monitor beautifully downscales them -- it's like an old school version supersampling before anyone was using that term. I'd say you're better off sticking with your 720p and 1080p models for those consoles though. It's a bit better to not toss out the extra resolution given how well plasmas upscale, and you can then use a model with a later generation panel than any 480p model will feature.
lately ppl start talking about plasmas for gaming, and they talk mostly about panasonic and pioneer plasmas. what happened to the crt giants like sony and toshiba? also in my area most plasmas for sale are samsung.
I'm really not sure of the history there either, but it's a good question I'm sure it was a huge investment to open a plasma panel production factory. I've seen Sony and Toshiba branded plasmas, but yeah, they're uncommon and not known as the top dogs. They probably did not produce their own panels like Pioneer and Panasonic did. Maybe someone else will respond later who knows more.
you can use Retroarch to get rid of the % overscan probably , you could emulate the games and get higher resolutions it has an option to change the aspect ratio to 1:1 too you can play with the CRT settings too , it actually changes the internal resolution of the monitor , as long as you have the program open you can add scanlines with a Shader at the bottom of the options , there's a lot of things to try to get a cracking looking game out of it
Thanks for the info. I prefer the challenge of trying to work with original hardware, but I definitely respect the emulation route. Each has a different set of complications to get the optimal experience, that's for sure. Mainly I went this route and have stayed on it since I never sold off my childhood consoles and have enjoyed the challenge of building setups this way for quite a while. The main reason I hunted this 720p plasma down was because I wanted one with a vertical resolution of exactly 720, which this one has. Usually they're 768. Even if I adjust to compensate for the forced overscan in software, it won't give the pixel-perfect vertical resolution that I was looking for. The TV will still be doing some vertical scaling. In the end it hardly matters, since the picture looks great, but I still just wanted it perfect hah. The Switch has software compensation for overscan, and it works great like you're saying -- it just doesn't achieve what I had really wanted.
It sounds like you're a display enthusiast, so I'd go for it. Plasma has advantages and disadvantages when compared to both CRTs and OLEDs. Against OLEDs, you get the advantages of more appealing SDR colors, much better motion clarity for low FPS content, better scaling of low res sources and the inputs to natively support them -- but you lose out on just about every other spec. Against CRTs, you get advantages in screen size, geometry (perfect), thickness, and weight -- all while keeping a strong taste of the picture quality appeal of a CRT. Plasma is sort of a middle ground between CRT and OLED.
Great comparison video. I am still gaming on my plasma Samsung pn42b400p3dxza which I've had since 2009 in my room... I use it for my PS2, PS3, Xbox, X360, and Wii consoles. I think it looks pretty solid for 480p and 720p content. It accepts 1080p inputs as well. Is this considered a decent monitor, or should I upgrade it to something else? It can definitely look dark at times, which is why I have cell light at max and contrast also at max.
I'm not familiar with that particular model, but if you like it I'd hang onto it and keep using it. With how cheap and accessible plasmas are right now though, I'd grab another to try out and at the very least keep as a backup. If you have to max out those settings, it's not a good sign.
I’ve never tried a 480p plasma, so to me, the PS2 and Xbox era is best on a CRT. It’s not just about the lower resolution, but the overall asset quality. For PS3 and Xbox 360, as you said, 720p plasmas are spot on. Those games look fantastic at that resolution, not just in terms of motion clarity, but they also get a sort of built-in anti-aliasing effect. The visuals feel a lot smoother compared to higher-res displays.
Yup, PS3 and 360 are hands down the best use case for plasmas. I actually forgot how much fun games from that generation can be. Trying to play them on a 65" LCD for years really soured my taste for them for a while. Even upgrading to an OLED of the same size didn't help much. I'll be playing a whole lot more of that gen now.
I have plasma TVs and 1 lg oled. I put my ps5 and series x on my 4K oled. Then I have my older ps4 pro and Xbox one x with my pc on my Panasonic plasma zt65, looks amazing. Then Xbox 360 and ps3 on a 720p 42 inch plasma then I have a 37 inch 480p for my original Xbox. Plasma are still my holy grail, especially my zt65
Very nice! It basically sounds like you've already figured out the same thing that I'm slowly learning through trial and error. We'll have very similar setups. 42" might be the sweet spot for close-up 360 and PS3 gaming. I'm going to try to reconfigure my home office to fit my 50" Kuro in with a comfortable seating distance. I plan to hook my PS4 Pro and Xbox One X into it. I'll have to see how it all works out. I don't think anything beats a little 37" 480p monitor for original Xbox -- I wish that they weren't so hard to find though.
That's good to know. Math checks out. Surprisingly the rectangular pixels didn't look bad, but that might be thanks to the pixels bing fairly closely packed on my 37" model.
If it's possible I really wanna get you a high-end HD CRT so you can compare the best Panasonic Kuro plasma next to it with an Xbox 360/PS3/Wii/Wii U, something 7th Gen or outputting 720p. But I can't
Yeah, that really would be neat to compare. The models I had weren't high end, except for maybe the KV-36XBR800 -- but that was just a "Hi-Scan" model. I have a vivid memory of seeing a nice widescreen Sony HD CRT in 2007 at a game shop playing Gear of War. It was a breathtaking sight.
i have 2 of the best plasmas and the input lag is just too noticable for me. it looks amazingly perfect though so sometimes I cave and play just for the visual
Great review, which one would you recommend for GameCube and Dreamcast ? Also when choosing a Plasma, what would your recommend to check before buying ?
Thanks! I really like how Dreamcast looks on my 480p plasma monitor over VGA, but models like this are very rare these days. If you do try to track down a 480p model, I'd look for an industrial style monitor instead of a TV. You'll have to add speakers if you go this route, unless you find one bundled with the accessory speakers. You could try a 480p TV model out, but I'm not sure if it will look and perform as good as mine. There's very little documentation on these for gaming. They're super cheap or free though, so you wouldn't have too much to lose. GameCube also looks really great on the 480p model. It looks very good on the 720p model too; I just don't like how mine oversaturates colors (especially red) and shares input controls between sources. To correct the color, I'd have to dive into the service menu (risky) and learn more about calibration. Some sets have better user color controls, but not mine. I haven't tested those two consoles on a 1080p plasma, but I'm willing to bet that they'll look great on there. A late model year 1080p plasma will give you the best black levels over older panels. The biggest concern when buying a plasma is whether or not it has burn-in. Burn-in is a good bit overblown as an issue, but it really did happen if someone watched the same TV channel all day for many days -- a channel logo or chyron could burn in. Industrial models may have displayed static content for years on end and have burn in -- but any in this state have probably been discarded by this point. There's really not too much else to look for. But before using mine, I always like to take them apart for some dusting. Beware that there a lot of screws. Models with fans will usually have a good bit of dust on the fan and some other components.
Biggest problem with Plasma TV's is the input lag. Even the best gaming Plasma ever released (Panasonic GT60) still has 1,5 frame input lag. A LG CX with rolling scan BFI in HDR and a Retrotink 4K or Morph 4K in triple buffer mode with awesome CRT emulation has about the same input lag. Looks better than any Plasma with higher brightness, better motion, better contrast, lower power draw and with awesome filters.
One of my plasmas measures about 1.5 frames of lag (a Panasonic S30), and I think that if someone lied to me and said it had zero input lag, I'd believe them. It really isn't perceptible at all as long as other sources of lag are kept to a minimum and there isn't any audio lag added. I have a LG OLED C1 + RetroTINK-4K and will be testing out the features you mentioned to see how it compares. A couple other people mentioned how good BFI is on a C1 for a 120 FPS sources, and now I'm very curious. I was quick to dismiss BFI after a bad experience on 60Hz content. Even if this turns out to be better, I think that plasmas are a very good option for a lot more people given the cost and complexity of this setup. Its hard to beat the simplicity of plugging a HDMI cable directly from an Xbox 360 into a $0 to ~$50 plasma TV and getting a wonderful result for 720p gaming. I believe that this is the best use case for plasmas. It's sort of like how you can plug a NES directly into a small CRT over composite and immediately enjoy gaming on it.
OLED display can match the motion clarity but the main issue is sample and hold. That pretty much defeats the motion clarity because of that otherwise you get flicker. If your TV has BFI I suggest checking that out as it significantly improves motion clarity at the cost of brightness. And boy they were right about power consumption, those plasmas you showed are chugging down power, especially compared to any LCD or OLED panel at that size while having less brightness and no HDR
My OLED is a LG C1. I had a pretty bad impression of BFI from my limited testing on "high" for 60 FPS games, but someone commented that the C1 can run it for 120 FPS sources unlike later models. I'll have to try this combined with PC gaming and my RetroTINK-4K after some more research. Usually I gamed on PC with VRR enabled, so BFI was always grayed out and I didn't give it any thought. And yeah, plasmas are super power hungry compared to modern displays but surprisingly it only adds up to a few cents per day in practice, unless its your main TV -- then it's several cents per day. Even powered on with a black screen they seem to draw roughly 40-100 watts if memory of my testing so far is correct.
Would you recommend a 720p or 1080p plasma for Wii gaming/DVD watching? And do they have enough input lag on the Wii as to where it can be distracting? Because if not I may genuinely be convinced to get a plasma instead of a 16:9 CRT
Upscaled DVDs will look good on either for sure. Even one of those dreadful widescreen DVDs with embedded black bars instead of a proper anamorphic widescreen format looked watchable on my 720p plasma when I used the built-in zoom feature to crop off the black bars. I was pretty very surprised how well it cleaned up compared to what I've seen on any other widescreen TVs. Moving the Wiimote cursor around on my 720p Panasonic, I could feel a bit of lag on it. For motion-based gameplay like Wii Sports, it is not an issue though. It might not be ideal for a rail-shooter style Wii game. However, on this same plasma, I was playing Guitar Hero III on Xbox 360 with zero lag compensation and having no issues. In about two weeks from now, maybe a bit longer, I'll hopefully have all the numbers in and testing complete. I ordered a Time Sleuth, and it is on the way. I believe that one of my 1080p plasmas will test extremely low, possibly 16ms! By the way, lots of 16:9 widescreen HD CRTs have some lag. Some are lag-free at 1080i though. I'm not sure which country you live in, but in USA I don't think I've ever seen a SD or ED widescreen CRT in the wild. One of those would be really nice for Wii.
Still use my Panasonic VT60 to this day. Integer scale really does miracles to the image, running NGC and PS2 games in 1080i looks crystal clear, even if some games appear stretched and adds a border on the top and bottom (480 x 2 = 960, so the empty space up to 1080 is why there are borders) But the 480p seems perfect for 6th gen games. :D
That's a really nice model I hear. Why are you scaling GameCube to 1080i though and with which scaler? I'm going to have to try playing around with integer upscaling for my 1080p panels and report back. I have a RetroTINK-4K and the OSSC shown to play around with, so it should be interesting.
@ oh right, I don’t have a scaler, I use OPL on PS2 and Swiss on NGC to do the scaling via component cables. Yeah, I guess that doesn’t make sense if you use an external scaler. 😅 You can still force most 480i games into 480p using homebrew though and on GameCube it can remove the “de-flicker” filter by setting “vertical scan” to 0.
They're excellent! Panasonic ended with very highly regarded models (even the budget models were great), and Samsung even had a highly regarded model with exceptional brightness. Pioneer was the leader in quality for years but exited the market early. Panasonic bought out their patents and used them to make those final model great, similar to a Pioneer Kuro. There's a whole debate whether Panasonic ever truly matched the quality of a Kuro. Either way, they were great in those final years.
sadly our Plasma Samsung 42" with 720p resolution been died after almost 20-21 years. used to look good on retro consoles, been using xbox 360 on old days before they bought a Bootleg British LCD TV from Tesco for sister in her room in 2009
That's neat, I've heard about those Slim Fit models but haven't seen them before. Usually people complain about their geometry. Is it as bad as everyone says, or were you able to reasonably correct it? Also, that's nice that yours supports 720p. The Samsung HD CRT that I owned and showed pictures of didn't support 720p. For PS3 gaming, I could only play in HD if the game itself supported 1080i output... I was stuck playing in 480p for most PS3 games.
@Dreamroom64 The geometry isn't perfect, but I don't really notice it in game. I could probably dial it in more through the installers menu. This is my 3rd HDCRT. The first two had the same scaling issue. I had to use an HDMI to component scaler to output 720p to 1080i to play a good chuck of PS3 games. It looks WAY better with the native support. I highly recommend for up to 7th gen consoles. It's the best CRT I have used IMO so far. My other HD CRTs were a Philips and a Toshiba.
Nice, I hope that his keeps going strong. I wish I could have bought a 65" plasma when they were new. By the time I started my career and was ready to buy my first new TV, plasmas had been off of the market for a few years. I had to settle for a Samsung "QLED."
Pio Plasmas from 2006 nativ 720p 360 games look like a dream on them u til you play them on a calibrated hd crt. About input lag all the old hdmi inputs should have a edid dongle to handshake the signal. The plasmas are really good to watch movies on.
I haven't had any problems with HDMI handshakes, but yeah, plasmas are definitely really fun for watching movies on. I'm revisiting my DVD and Blu-ray library a lot more now.
You conviced me to buy plasma, but there is something better... DLP projectors, TVs are more rare. I bought a 720p Optoma HD 65 for X360 (at 2009) and it was jaw dropping for everyone. Am sure You can buy even low resolution one for very low price (not sure if there are such low as 480p but I've seen 1024x768 )
I forgot to ask last time if you are able to notice any "rainbow effect" on that projector. I remember noticing it a bit in school/college on the various DLPs. I could never really appreciate them since the rooms were never very dark -- plus they were data projectors. It definitely sounds like something fun to try out, and I love how it's portable. I'll be keeping an eye out at thrift shops from now on instead of passing by them without much thought.
@@Dreamroom64 mostly, I've seen rainbow effect when moving head quickly from side to side (shaking) or moving hands quickly on front of me- on screen. Maybe some people are more sensitive to this kind of pictures, but me and few of my friends using this projektor, never complaint. There are so many models, becouse of DLP evolution, and many models that cost 10k $$$ fifteen years ago now worth 50-100$. Anyway, if You really want to be sure, that rainbow effect is low, buy a projektor with six segment colour wheel, like in my classic BenQ w 1080ST+ (short throw) it's great 1080p 60Hz (limited Hz to those days and HDMI connection) and it's just 24ms input lag! BenQ W- 1070/+/1075, 1080ST/+/1085ST, are just generations (mostly better brightness/lamp and it's lifetime) and ST is just Short Throw version. You can find a lot models, even for gaming - depend on age and price. If you want to have a bright projector buy one with 3500 ANSI Lumens (Lumens from trade Mark :) There are also ALR screens, and You can just watch projector on bright room! Only that it cannot be on front of window/s or light sources and... they are expensive. I'm fighting with myself to buy one, but it's around 500$ for around 80 inch screen (depend on material used) anyway- good luck - it's worth to check it ;)
I've worked in accounting most of my career. What's really important is that I keep my expenses low and carry no high-interest debt. I splurge a bit for my game room but always look for deals and the best values. I do a lot of thrifting and patient shopping. Outside of my core hobbies, I'm pretty stingy hah.
Nah crts is where it’s at, plasmas are nice but in my experience they’ve either ran hot, worry about imagine burn in and definitely latency issue. I can’t recommend my Oled enough for modern gaming and the charm on crt/pvm monitors
My main complaint about HD CRTs is how poor the geometry is, save for maybe the best Sony. Also, the first two that I owned couldn't even take a 720p signal, so PS3 gaming on them was limited to 480p for a huge chunk of the library. HD CRTs also don't work with light guns, so they don't have anything on plasma in this regards to this like an SD CRT. Plasma gives very good motion clarity with perfect geometry, less bulk, larger sizes, and its own picture quality charm. And I like how available plasmas are right now and the fact that I can even pick up my 50" Kuro without help. My solo CRT weightlifting abilities top out at about the 27" Tau shown in the video hah. Anyway, I plan to stick with my Sony PVM CRT for 240p gaming. It's definitely the best tool for that job. I just think that plasmas are arguably the best tool for the job for most folks when it comes to Xbox 360 and PS3 gaming. The games on this gen aren't so sensitive to a couple frames of lag. DVDs are especially nice on plasmas as well.
@ I guess it’s each to their own, I personally never liked the look on plasma, and just the idea of burn in alone always kept me steer clear. Hd crt’s yes are terrible for gaming imo, but to each their own, maybe I’ll give another chance to the plasma if I come across a cheaper one
@@LanceHayabusa I'd be OK with the Olympus badge if it looked better. The Olympus badge is a cheap rectangle, and the model is truly just a Sony with a different paint job.
Agreed, it's really cool. I was looking for something that I could place there without being too bulky or closing the room off. It happened to have the right wood color tone out of the box! I had to modify it a bit to fit my plasma monitor and have a couple more ideas to enhance it, which I'll show later on.
Great rabbit hole video, love learning about stuff I didn't know I was interested in. Came for the room setup but all your videos are great, Keep it up !
Thank you! More to come!
Nice taster video. Everything looked pretty good. Looking forward to the lag tests.
My inlaws had a plasma in their bedroom. They're pretty well off and were early adopters. I was shocked by how hot and heavy it was. The fan was also very audible.
That's a pretty big flex to have used one as a bedroom TV back in the day!
9:00 I worked at Sears in electronics when HD widescreen CRTs were a thing. It took me and three other guys to get a 34" Sony widescreen CRT to get it on a shelf 5 foot high. The door to the stockroom was too short to get the forklift otherwise we would have. Fun fact, I accidently broke one of the first LCD TVs we got: a 19", I want to say Zenith? with a sale price of around $1,200.
Wow, I didn't even think about how much harder it might be to move one of those beasts in the original box -- adds even more bulk and weight. I wonder how many workers' comp cases ever resulted from them...
Breaking that TV sounds like a nightmare day at work. I worked in retail and helped a customer load a TV into his sedan. He wanted it loaded sideways, and I knew this was a bad idea. Sure enough, he showed up later with a broken TV to return.
@@Dreamroom64 The TV was out of the box because it was going on display. As you know, this makes the front very heavy while not having much to grip on the slanted back. Seriously why did no one put handle grips on these heavy TVs!
Fantastic video! Looking forward to the lag tests.
a 4:3 Pioneer plasma is one of my biggest all time holy grails… And that’s coming from a guy with a BVM D24
It's a dream of mine to have one of those too, even though they're using early panel tech. I actually laid eyes on some at an indoor flea market many years ago, roughly 2013. They were powered off, and the seller had two or three of them on a huge rack mount with the panels oriented in a column. He was asking a lot though; I had no money and no way to get one home. I never saw them again.
I did a Facebook marketplace for plasmas. You’re not kidding, a lot of cheap options. I currently don’t have the space but I’m hoping to make it feasible soon because it seems like really cool tech.
Yup, people are unloading them right now and consider them junk. They're basically in the same position that CRTs found themselves 14 years ago. I didn't really have space either, but I'm making it hah.
My grandmother has a panasonic plasma similar to yours, i remember growing up and being blown away by how good it looked!! I usually game on my Panasonic Tau, but this inspired me to try other mediums for my retro collection. Thanks for the video!
Great to hear that, and thanks for sharing your memory!
I had to sell my 65" plasma because I didn't have space for it and my OLED, my dad still has a 60" plasma and my mom a 40" plasma, I hope to inherit both and find a good place for them.
i miss plasmas, they were an interesting technology and incredibly under appreciated nowadays
You want a LG C1 OLED because 120hz BFI was discontinued after that model, which I believe helps with retro gaming
Interesting, that's actually the OLED model that I have. I may have been too quick to dismiss BFI on it after mediocre experiences using it directly on 60 FPS content. It added a lot of flicker on the highest mode.
I have a RetroTINK-4K but haven't expeimented with the high frame modes on it yet. You're saying I could combine this feature with the C1's built-in BFI feature and get a decent result?
I also do some 120 FPS PC gaming on it. I'll have to read up on combining this with BFI too.
@@Dreamroom64Blurbusters are saying 480Hz OLED beats plasma in motion clarity. Not sure if BFI is enough for that or if they are talking about CRT filters.
Me and my wife are still plasma TV holdouts with 58” 1080p and 42” 720p, which both look excellent still, but thinking I will get a 27” 1440p OLED for my PC gaming setup where I use IPS monitors.
Or even better, a Panasonic JZ2000 that has BFI @120hz as well but with increased brightness, better PQ and very impressive sound
I had c1 .terribly dim and colors washed out .yellows and green loik like puke. When getting oled u want it to pop and c1 does not pop .its also not as good as plasma because plasma has better colors and motion
7:57
I'm curious how does it stack up with oled with black frame insertion [BFI] turned on in settings?
I always thought that was the "best" to play retro games.
BFI helps somewhat but is underwhelming from what I can remember the last time I used it on my C1. On "high," it quite noticeably flickers. It inherently dims the picture by inserting black frames, and when you stack the loss of brightness from BFI plus the loss of brightness from applying a simulated scanline or pixel grid filter, it only further dims the picture. And brightness is already a bit of a weakness of OLED TVs.
In the end, from my experience, it just doesn't look crispy like a beautiful CRT or plasma. To top it all off, the SDR colors on OLED aren't as natural and pleasing as plasma or CRT. There's just something about those phosphors. RetroTINK-4K can help the whole OLED situation by injecting HDR, but I can say for sure that even with this, I've never seen anything from my C1 that wowed me immediately like my pre-calibration Kuro. I think a good analogy would be to compare a real neon sign vs. a LED "neon" sign. LED "neon" signs look good, but they just don't have the magical look of a true neon sign in darkness.
I think OLED has a bright future though, and I still like it nonetheless. I have a 165Hz QD-OLED Alienware monitor and it is seriously impressive for high framerate games, both in terms of motion clarity and stunning colors. The C1 is nice for 120Hz PC gaming. I'm just not sure how well the technology, as it progresses, will work when it comes to adapting to displaying 30-60 FPS SDR content from old consoles. This is why I think it's important that we preserve plasmas before they all go to e-waste facilities. It's such a cheap, accessible way right now to get great performance out of original hardware.
Great video. Subscribed 👍
I have 5 Panasonic plasmas, including 2 720p and 3 1080ps. The best model is the 2010 58 inch THX 3D model, and is the only model that has an option to disable overscan. It also has VGA input and plays very well with the Dreamcast.
I also have a Panasonic Tau HD CRT paired with an OSSC to handle line doubling. The overscan can't be disabled even in the service menu and weighs 160lbs, but does look good so I keep it around.
Thanks for the spotlight on plasmas
Great content. I love plasmas.
Great video, love your space. I still have my Pioneer Elite 42” and use it as my main TV…
Thanks, and glad to hear that you still have one going strong!
@ Thanks, I bought the Pioneer ELITE SC-07 A/V Receiver back in the day too and still use it as well…
Great video, I never considered a 480p plasma. I need one more display for 4 player system link and I think that is a perfect option. I have 2 CRTs, that’s enough liability for me lol
Thanks! Yeah, the 480p plasmas are easy to overlook and dismiss. It's just tough to find the professional monitors. I think most of the EDTV plasmas (usually how they were marketed) didn't have advanced picture controls to let you properly resize the picture to eliminate overscan. They're still probably pretty neat though and almost completely forgotten today. It's one of those things that is extremely hard to research, so you'll just have to get one that you can find and hope for the best like I did. It's sort of like a treasure hunt.
Hi mate,
I have 5 TV’s. A 32 inch Panasonic 720P CRT, a 50 inch Panasonic Plasma, A 54 inch 3D Panasonic Plasma, a 65 inch Sony LED and a 65 inch LG C1 OLED.
I’ve owned them all since new.
Unfortunately Panasonic TV’s are no longer sold new here in Australia. Not even their OLED.
Pricing of Panasonic Plasmas when new here were $3,500 for the 54 inch 3D model.
At the time it came with a voucher for a 3D Bluray entertainment system and the 3D Avatar movie which looked amazing on it.
I miss 3D movies.
Everything is in perfect condition.
Great video!! Subscribing now. Very detailed true info
Thanks for the comment and for subscribing!
I have a 60 inch Samsung Plasma but it stopped turning on. I can't bring myself to get rid of it for hopes of one day fixing it.
I need to get a 480 P plasma I grew up with one, currently I have two plasmas both 1080 P one is 46inch and the other one is a vt60 one of the last made by Panasonic, I daily the VT 60 it’s an amazing set! Something to note is the 46 inch despite also being 1080 P seems to treat 480p better, wonder if there’s a correlation or not. By the way, thanks for the video. I’m glad more people are making videos about plasmas.
Thanks for watching and commenting! Great to hear that you've got a couple going strong. Really rare to hear about someone remembering owning a 480p plasma -- it's almost like they never even existed at this point.
I've got two 1080p panels now too, the Kuro PRO-101FD shown and a 42" Panasonic S30. I'll have to experiment with how 480p looks on both, just haven't had a chance yet. Great to hear that it works so well with one of yours. If you get a chance, please let me know the model number on your 46"; I'm curious.
Liked video because you are literally the only other person that agrees with me that a plasma is better than a HD crt. (Definately agree with you alsp that 240p and 480i content is best left to standard def crts)
Still using a Panny P42X1 as out living room TV, coming up on fifteen years this summer. Really want to upgrade soon, but I wonder if I'm being too picky holding out for a 120Hz display.
If you're planning to run a lot of 120 FPS games and HDR content on your next TV, it might be worth upgrading to a good OLED. But if you're mainly displaying SDR, 24/30/60 FPS content you're in good shape sticking with the plasma.
My main tv is still my 1080p Vieira, such a great TV
The image looks so good. I had a 50inch plasma samsung but the image would be oversharpen
I was an idiot who had an LCD tv back in the 360/ps3 era for the most part, but I smartened up and got a panasonic ST60 as it was the last plasma made by panasonic. Incredible display that was the best I've ever had. I've upgraded to an oled, but still, the 4k/hdr perfect black of my oled feels kinda common, when I was rocking the plasma in 2014 it felt like my TV was soooooo much better than everyone elses (because it was).
Really regret passing up on a 480p plasma that I saw for dirt cheap a few years ago now that I know that they have a really good niche use case. I'm frantically searching marketplace but everything is 720p/1080p (and I already own a great 1080 plasma). I really want a 480p one for my ps2/wii!
Good luck on the hunt! Neat hearing how superior that ST60 felt compared to all of the LCDs others were using!
I have 2 Panasonic Plasma's, a 42 inch 720p and 46 inch 1080p. I would love a 480p Plasma for my old retro consoles.
Nice! More!
I still have my 51” Samsung Plasma, it was our main television until 2017, now it sits in one of our rooms, it was just in our game room for a few years, connected to our PS3, XBOX 360, Wii and Blu-Ray Player but never liked the fact that it would run extremely hot, it will Make our summer days even hotter (miserable) and our winters quite pleasant - our plasma now sits unused, some vertical red lines have formed on the screen so more likely will be trashed in a few years if not sooner. I liked plasmas for their price , connectivity options and the 3D feature but hate it for the overheating issues and extremely reflective screen.
I wonder why some seemed to run so hot. I read on a forum post recently that Samsungs in particular seemed to run hotter than other brands. My three Panasonics definitely don't get too hot; two don't even have fans! It probably helps that I don't run them at max brightness. I mainly game at night.
I got my 2010 50inch panasonic last year on FB market have been loving it. Only gripe I have is that it has a grounding whine when it displays bright scenes. Dug up some research and found there’s pcb mount screw kits you can replace on them. Havent taken it apart yet, but we'll see if that resolves the grounding whine.
I noticed that they buzz a bit on bright screens, like the Xbox 360 dashboard, especially my 720p model from 2006. It is normal behavior from what I've read, but I'd like to try to quiet it down a bit if there's such a simple solution. Hopefully that idea works for you. It's a good idea to clean out the accumulated dust inside anyway.
Congrats on the Kuro.
Definitely will keep my eye out on input lag tests, I've been keeping my eye out for a Panasonic Tau HD CRT for my sixth gen consoles because they do have zero input lag on 480p. But if the 480p Plasmas are a good alternative, I might keep my eye out for those.
I'm pretty sure that one of my plasmas will test very well, but we'll see. The Panasonic Tau HD CRT that I had was really nice for 480p, but a big disappointment was how it handled 480i. I used to primarily use it for GameCube and Wii, and this was before the days of me using Swiss to force any GameCube games to 480p. Whenever I'd play a game with only 480i support, it looked terrible. It was pretty disappointing overall.
It also didn't support 720p, so it wasn't great for PS3. So if you do ever get one, if it is anything like the one I had, keep these things in mind.
240p content also looked very bad on it, even worse than 480i if I recall correctly. It might be neat to try to take the OSSC to line double a 240p source to 480p, convert back to analog with a lag-free component converter, and see how it looks. It might look really great with this configuration, but the OSSC wasn't around back when I had it.
@Dreamroom64 I already have a Sony Trinitron, which already looks great for 240p and 480i content, so that wouldn't really be a problem for me.
The only other thing is, a lot of the games I like are dark. Stuff like Splinter Cell, I dont think would really look great on a plasma, but idk
Do any modern pc gaming on the kuro? Contemplating picking up a 1080p plasma cos oleds are expensive and am not a fan of lcd.
No, I haven't tried PC gaming on it yet. I just recently got it and didn't take too much time to experiment before pulling the main board for repairs. I'll have it back up and running soon. It supports 1:1 pixel mapping at 1080p, so it would work well connected to a PC.
However, you might want to track down a late 1080p Panasonic plasma instead of a Kuro. They're easier to find in good working order. Look for manufacture dates 2011 through 2013 (Panasonic's final year selling plasma TVs). I have one from 2011, and it also supports 1:1 pixel mapping despite being a budget model.
Some of the earlier 1080p models may force some overscan. You could compensate for it with your graphic card settings (not ideal) or hope to find a way to disable it in the TV's service menu (risky if you're not super careful).
But yeah, a 1080p plasma can be a great choice for PC gaming. It will look way better than playing on an LCD. And like I said in the video, 60 FPS looks awesome on them. You'll be able to max out any game.
Just don't leave your taskbar at showing or any other static graphics for several hours repeatedly. Plasmas do best with varied content filling the whole screen.
@@Dreamroom64 Wow, thank you for the comprehensive reply, would love to see more footage of tests on the plasmas in the future.
Still got my 50 inch plasma from 2012
Had to replace the I/O connector board, which was fun to do.
Though now every once in a while the whites go crazy when it's first turned on, I want this thing to last so much longer
Hopefully if more people take an interest in plasmas now we'll have better resources to keep them alive over the years. I wish I had the electronics knowledge to really diagnose problems myself and truly understand service manuals.
could never get use to the flicker on PDP's back in the day. sydney trains use to use NEC plasmasync 4:3 displays as next train info boards, they showed up enmass on ebay with burn in like you wouldn't believe
Hah, yeah, plasma really wasn't the right choice for static display boards like that. I guess it was chosen since large LCDs used to be even more expensive or non-existent.
I remember seeing some plasma monitors at a train station in the US with severe burn-in too. This was around 2012.
Playing around with a surviving 4:3 plasma would be really interesting, but it seems like they're all gone now aside from a few in enthusiasts' hands. Pioneer had a 4:3 model that could handle 240p perfectly without any external scalers.
I get that the motion clarity is better, but why is the color better?
I don't know all of the technical details well enough yet, but I know that plasmas have no white subpixel like a WOLED. So they produce white wonderfully and uniformly. And unlike an LCD, they're self emissive. Like CRTs, their light comes from phosphors -- it has a distinct look to the colors that is missing from other flat panel display technologies.
I think a good analogy that makes sense is how a real neon sign looks vs. a neon-style LED sign. Both look good, but there's a little something extra special about the glow and colors of real neon in a dark place compared to the copycat. The LED signs are cheaper, brighter, and more energy efficient... but they are missing the magic that real neon has.
@@Dreamroom64 I wish I had gotten a Viera plasma when they were nearing their end, instead of going with LCD. I can't remember what made me change my decision. I think the LCD for the same price was 1080p and the plasma was 720p-ish. I'd like to see one in person sometime, but probably not enough to pick one up as I already have too much stuff... OLED looks pretty good to me though, the one I have, so i'll stick with that
You briefly showed 480i in the montage, and I was interested in hearing your thoughts regarding this on a plasma since ultimately you still have to deinterlace the image and I feel these older algorithms would show a lot of combing under motion (compared to a retrotink 4k at least)
On my 2003 model 480p plasma (TH-37PW5), the deinterlacing is somehow amazing. It seriously looks like a progressive scan image to me in motion or still. I've read on one forum post that someone who has this model (42" version) and compared it to a similar commercial model from a few years later noticed a decrease in the deinterlacing quality for motion. Maybe Panasonic really focused on it for this particular generation. I think it has higher lag for 480i though than 480p/720p handling, which I'll test soon with a Time Sleuth.
I didn't do too much testing on the 720p model since I didn't like how oversaturated its colors were for SD content. But from what I briefly remember (and that one quick PaRappa the Rapper 2 clip on that set), it performed well at deinterlacing. I'll test input lag on this one too for various resolutions.
I have a Panasonic industrial 50" plasma ands it's awesome with my PS3. It's a 1080p panel also. Had it from new. Does have fans but you don't hear them when it's in use.
Awesome, the industrial monitors are so cool and underappreciated. I wish that it were easier to track them down these days and research the capabilities of each model. They were built like tanks.
@@Dreamroom64 Your right about it being a tank, my model is the TH-50PF10UK it has identical carry handles to the one you have. I love with mine I can pull out the board and change the connections type as needed. The reason I got it back in the day as it could take PAL and NTSC signals and I didn't even start using it for gaming at first it was purchased for home cinema use and was for DVD and LaserDisc playback, now its become my retro gaming display.
I have 2 hd crts im currently using. One is a super fine pitch, sony, it's calibrated and looks great. I've been thinking about getting a plasma for some time, just to try it out.
What do you use to clean your plasma screen with? I have some smudges on my new to me plasma and don't want to mess it up.
Good question! My favorite spray cleaner is Sprayway. Though it isn't officially marketed as a screen cleaner, it has worked perfectly for me. It's marketed as a glass cleaner but isn't harsh like Windex. I use the regular kind with a blue cap. I've used it on my Alienware OLED monitor (has a special coating), a Panasonic S30 plasma, and my arcade machine's monitor without any issues. I actually discovered that it's good for screens since the arcade machine company recommended it for wiping smudges from the game's touch screen.
It leaves no streaks and comes in a large spray can. It's available at most big box stores, like Home Depot for a few dollars. Just spray it onto a clean microfiber rag and wipe.
Other than this product, I've used some old flat panel TV cleaner spray that I got from a defunct brand that is no longer on the market.
Since you'd be cleaning your plasma for the first time, I'd recommend hitting the screen with some compressed air if there are any dust/debris chunks. You definitely wouldn't want to grind those over the screen when wiping.
Oh yeah, supposedly the Panasonic VX300 (professional display) is a 1080p 120hz 10bit monitor. I wish I could see a plasma running games in 120hz. But the smallest size is 65”. 😅
I can hardly even imagine how good it would look. I wonder if the legends are true.
I got an lg 42 inch 768p plasma manufactured in may 2011 it's great condition condition I got it for free from my previous apartment owner the only issue it has is 1 out of the 2 hdmi port is not working but other than that it has no issues.
I mainly use it with my steam deck it looks great when I display games at 900p I finished red dead 2 on it it had great colors, contrast , and motion clarity it also great for horror games because of the black levels.
Glad to hear it's working so well for you aside from that HDMI port -- not too much of an issue with how cheap and reliable automatic HDMI switches have become.
I have a plasma from 2011 as well, and yeah, the black levels really improved by that time. Steam Deck sounds like a good use case for sure.
Thanks for sharing, I have 2 plasmas, Panasonic 768p and 1080p, they are great. One question, have you plugged in ps3 and Xbox360 to 480p plasma? If so, do you think it looks decent?
Yup, 720p games including PS3 and 360 look very good on my 480p plasma. The monitor beautifully downscales them -- it's like an old school version supersampling before anyone was using that term.
I'd say you're better off sticking with your 720p and 1080p models for those consoles though. It's a bit better to not toss out the extra resolution given how well plasmas upscale, and you can then use a model with a later generation panel than any 480p model will feature.
lately ppl start talking about plasmas for gaming, and they talk mostly about panasonic and pioneer plasmas. what happened to the crt giants like sony and toshiba? also in my area most plasmas for sale are samsung.
I'm really not sure of the history there either, but it's a good question I'm sure it was a huge investment to open a plasma panel production factory. I've seen Sony and Toshiba branded plasmas, but yeah, they're uncommon and not known as the top dogs. They probably did not produce their own panels like Pioneer and Panasonic did.
Maybe someone else will respond later who knows more.
you can use Retroarch to get rid of the % overscan probably , you could emulate the games and get higher resolutions
it has an option to change the aspect ratio to 1:1 too
you can play with the CRT settings too , it actually changes the internal resolution of the monitor , as long as you have the program open
you can add scanlines with a Shader at the bottom of the options ,
there's a lot of things to try to get a cracking looking game out of it
Thanks for the info. I prefer the challenge of trying to work with original hardware, but I definitely respect the emulation route. Each has a different set of complications to get the optimal experience, that's for sure. Mainly I went this route and have stayed on it since I never sold off my childhood consoles and have enjoyed the challenge of building setups this way for quite a while.
The main reason I hunted this 720p plasma down was because I wanted one with a vertical resolution of exactly 720, which this one has. Usually they're 768. Even if I adjust to compensate for the forced overscan in software, it won't give the pixel-perfect vertical resolution that I was looking for. The TV will still be doing some vertical scaling. In the end it hardly matters, since the picture looks great, but I still just wanted it perfect hah. The Switch has software compensation for overscan, and it works great like you're saying -- it just doesn't achieve what I had really wanted.
I have a 48"and 65" OLED tv. I also have an unhealthy amount of CRT tvs. Should i still get a Plasma?
It sounds like you're a display enthusiast, so I'd go for it. Plasma has advantages and disadvantages when compared to both CRTs and OLEDs.
Against OLEDs, you get the advantages of more appealing SDR colors, much better motion clarity for low FPS content, better scaling of low res sources and the inputs to natively support them -- but you lose out on just about every other spec. Against CRTs, you get advantages in screen size, geometry (perfect), thickness, and weight -- all while keeping a strong taste of the picture quality appeal of a CRT.
Plasma is sort of a middle ground between CRT and OLED.
Great comparison video. I am still gaming on my plasma Samsung pn42b400p3dxza which I've had since 2009 in my room... I use it for my PS2, PS3, Xbox, X360, and Wii consoles. I think it looks pretty solid for 480p and 720p content. It accepts 1080p inputs as well. Is this considered a decent monitor, or should I upgrade it to something else? It can definitely look dark at times, which is why I have cell light at max and contrast also at max.
I'm not familiar with that particular model, but if you like it I'd hang onto it and keep using it. With how cheap and accessible plasmas are right now though, I'd grab another to try out and at the very least keep as a backup. If you have to max out those settings, it's not a good sign.
Plasma is the new crt! plasma's get slept on so hard!
I'm sure people will figure out how great they are later... I just hope many can do so before most are gone from circulation.
I’ve never tried a 480p plasma, so to me, the PS2 and Xbox era is best on a CRT. It’s not just about the lower resolution, but the overall asset quality. For PS3 and Xbox 360, as you said, 720p plasmas are spot on. Those games look fantastic at that resolution, not just in terms of motion clarity, but they also get a sort of built-in anti-aliasing effect. The visuals feel a lot smoother compared to higher-res displays.
Yup, PS3 and 360 are hands down the best use case for plasmas. I actually forgot how much fun games from that generation can be. Trying to play them on a 65" LCD for years really soured my taste for them for a while. Even upgrading to an OLED of the same size didn't help much. I'll be playing a whole lot more of that gen now.
I have plasma TVs and 1 lg oled. I put my ps5 and series x on my 4K oled. Then I have my older ps4 pro and Xbox one x with my pc on my Panasonic plasma zt65, looks amazing. Then Xbox 360 and ps3 on a 720p 42 inch plasma then I have a 37 inch 480p for my original Xbox. Plasma are still my holy grail, especially my zt65
Very nice! It basically sounds like you've already figured out the same thing that I'm slowly learning through trial and error. We'll have very similar setups.
42" might be the sweet spot for close-up 360 and PS3 gaming. I'm going to try to reconfigure my home office to fit my 50" Kuro in with a comfortable seating distance. I plan to hook my PS4 Pro and Xbox One X into it. I'll have to see how it all works out.
I don't think anything beats a little 37" 480p monitor for original Xbox -- I wish that they weren't so hard to find though.
The 50” silver Panasonics has traditional square pixel 720p (1366x768) screens.
That's good to know. Math checks out. Surprisingly the rectangular pixels didn't look bad, but that might be thanks to the pixels bing fairly closely packed on my 37" model.
If it's possible I really wanna get you a high-end HD CRT so you can compare the best Panasonic Kuro plasma next to it with an Xbox 360/PS3/Wii/Wii U, something 7th Gen or outputting 720p. But I can't
Yeah, that really would be neat to compare. The models I had weren't high end, except for maybe the KV-36XBR800 -- but that was just a "Hi-Scan" model. I have a vivid memory of seeing a nice widescreen Sony HD CRT in 2007 at a game shop playing Gear of War. It was a breathtaking sight.
i have 2 of the best plasmas and the input lag is just too noticable for me. it looks amazingly perfect though so sometimes I cave and play just for the visual
Now i want a plasma.
Great review, which one would you recommend for GameCube and Dreamcast ?
Also when choosing a Plasma, what would your recommend to check before buying ?
Thanks! I really like how Dreamcast looks on my 480p plasma monitor over VGA, but models like this are very rare these days. If you do try to track down a 480p model, I'd look for an industrial style monitor instead of a TV. You'll have to add speakers if you go this route, unless you find one bundled with the accessory speakers.
You could try a 480p TV model out, but I'm not sure if it will look and perform as good as mine. There's very little documentation on these for gaming. They're super cheap or free though, so you wouldn't have too much to lose.
GameCube also looks really great on the 480p model. It looks very good on the 720p model too; I just don't like how mine oversaturates colors (especially red) and shares input controls between sources. To correct the color, I'd have to dive into the service menu (risky) and learn more about calibration. Some sets have better user color controls, but not mine.
I haven't tested those two consoles on a 1080p plasma, but I'm willing to bet that they'll look great on there. A late model year 1080p plasma will give you the best black levels over older panels.
The biggest concern when buying a plasma is whether or not it has burn-in. Burn-in is a good bit overblown as an issue, but it really did happen if someone watched the same TV channel all day for many days -- a channel logo or chyron could burn in. Industrial models may have displayed static content for years on end and have burn in -- but any in this state have probably been discarded by this point.
There's really not too much else to look for. But before using mine, I always like to take them apart for some dusting. Beware that there a lot of screws. Models with fans will usually have a good bit of dust on the fan and some other components.
@ thanks a lot boss 🤝🤝🤝
Biggest problem with Plasma TV's is the input lag. Even the best gaming Plasma ever released (Panasonic GT60) still has 1,5 frame input lag. A LG CX with rolling scan BFI in HDR and a Retrotink 4K or Morph 4K in triple buffer mode with awesome CRT emulation has about the same input lag. Looks better than any Plasma with higher brightness, better motion, better contrast, lower power draw and with awesome filters.
One of my plasmas measures about 1.5 frames of lag (a Panasonic S30), and I think that if someone lied to me and said it had zero input lag, I'd believe them. It really isn't perceptible at all as long as other sources of lag are kept to a minimum and there isn't any audio lag added.
I have a LG OLED C1 + RetroTINK-4K and will be testing out the features you mentioned to see how it compares. A couple other people mentioned how good BFI is on a C1 for a 120 FPS sources, and now I'm very curious. I was quick to dismiss BFI after a bad experience on 60Hz content. Even if this turns out to be better, I think that plasmas are a very good option for a lot more people given the cost and complexity of this setup.
Its hard to beat the simplicity of plugging a HDMI cable directly from an Xbox 360 into a $0 to ~$50 plasma TV and getting a wonderful result for 720p gaming. I believe that this is the best use case for plasmas. It's sort of like how you can plug a NES directly into a small CRT over composite and immediately enjoy gaming on it.
OLED display can match the motion clarity but the main issue is sample and hold. That pretty much defeats the motion clarity because of that otherwise you get flicker. If your TV has BFI I suggest checking that out as it significantly improves motion clarity at the cost of brightness.
And boy they were right about power consumption, those plasmas you showed are chugging down power, especially compared to any LCD or OLED panel at that size while having less brightness and no HDR
My OLED is a LG C1. I had a pretty bad impression of BFI from my limited testing on "high" for 60 FPS games, but someone commented that the C1 can run it for 120 FPS sources unlike later models. I'll have to try this combined with PC gaming and my RetroTINK-4K after some more research. Usually I gamed on PC with VRR enabled, so BFI was always grayed out and I didn't give it any thought.
And yeah, plasmas are super power hungry compared to modern displays but surprisingly it only adds up to a few cents per day in practice, unless its your main TV -- then it's several cents per day. Even powered on with a black screen they seem to draw roughly 40-100 watts if memory of my testing so far is correct.
Would you recommend a 720p or 1080p plasma for Wii gaming/DVD watching? And do they have enough input lag on the Wii as to where it can be distracting? Because if not I may genuinely be convinced to get a plasma instead of a 16:9 CRT
Upscaled DVDs will look good on either for sure. Even one of those dreadful widescreen DVDs with embedded black bars instead of a proper anamorphic widescreen format looked watchable on my 720p plasma when I used the built-in zoom feature to crop off the black bars. I was pretty very surprised how well it cleaned up compared to what I've seen on any other widescreen TVs.
Moving the Wiimote cursor around on my 720p Panasonic, I could feel a bit of lag on it. For motion-based gameplay like Wii Sports, it is not an issue though. It might not be ideal for a rail-shooter style Wii game. However, on this same plasma, I was playing Guitar Hero III on Xbox 360 with zero lag compensation and having no issues. In about two weeks from now, maybe a bit longer, I'll hopefully have all the numbers in and testing complete. I ordered a Time Sleuth, and it is on the way. I believe that one of my 1080p plasmas will test extremely low, possibly 16ms!
By the way, lots of 16:9 widescreen HD CRTs have some lag. Some are lag-free at 1080i though. I'm not sure which country you live in, but in USA I don't think I've ever seen a SD or ED widescreen CRT in the wild. One of those would be really nice for Wii.
Still use my Panasonic VT60 to this day.
Integer scale really does miracles to the image, running NGC and PS2 games in 1080i looks crystal clear, even if some games appear stretched and adds a border on the top and bottom (480 x 2 = 960, so the empty space up to 1080 is why there are borders)
But the 480p seems perfect for 6th gen games. :D
That's a really nice model I hear. Why are you scaling GameCube to 1080i though and with which scaler? I'm going to have to try playing around with integer upscaling for my 1080p panels and report back. I have a RetroTINK-4K and the OSSC shown to play around with, so it should be interesting.
@ oh right, I don’t have a scaler, I use OPL on PS2 and Swiss on NGC to do the scaling via component cables. Yeah, I guess that doesn’t make sense if you use an external scaler. 😅
You can still force most 480i games into 480p using homebrew though and on GameCube it can remove the “de-flicker” filter by setting “vertical scan” to 0.
I wonder what the very last high end Plasmas were like.
They're excellent! Panasonic ended with very highly regarded models (even the budget models were great), and Samsung even had a highly regarded model with exceptional brightness.
Pioneer was the leader in quality for years but exited the market early. Panasonic bought out their patents and used them to make those final model great, similar to a Pioneer Kuro. There's a whole debate whether Panasonic ever truly matched the quality of a Kuro. Either way, they were great in those final years.
sadly our Plasma Samsung 42" with 720p resolution been died after almost 20-21 years. used to look good on retro consoles, been using xbox 360 on old days before they bought a Bootleg British LCD TV from Tesco for sister in her room in 2009
Darn, too bad it failed, but it sounds like it had a good run -- especially compared to the lifespan I'd expect to get out of a TV these days.
I have had several Plasmas over the years. I prefer my Samsung Slim Fit CRT with native 720p. Better motion clarity and no input lag
That's neat, I've heard about those Slim Fit models but haven't seen them before. Usually people complain about their geometry. Is it as bad as everyone says, or were you able to reasonably correct it?
Also, that's nice that yours supports 720p. The Samsung HD CRT that I owned and showed pictures of didn't support 720p. For PS3 gaming, I could only play in HD if the game itself supported 1080i output... I was stuck playing in 480p for most PS3 games.
@Dreamroom64 The geometry isn't perfect, but I don't really notice it in game. I could probably dial it in more through the installers menu. This is my 3rd HDCRT. The first two had the same scaling issue. I had to use an HDMI to component scaler to output 720p to 1080i to play a good chuck of PS3 games. It looks WAY better with the native support. I highly recommend for up to 7th gen consoles. It's the best CRT I have used IMO so far. My other HD CRTs were a Philips and a Toshiba.
Plasmas são lindas demais.😊❤
I had to sell my 65" Plasma because I didn't have room for both that and my new OLED, my dad still has a 60" so I'm hoping I will inherit that.
Nice, I hope that his keeps going strong. I wish I could have bought a 65" plasma when they were new. By the time I started my career and was ready to buy my first new TV, plasmas had been off of the market for a few years. I had to settle for a Samsung "QLED."
Pio Plasmas from 2006 nativ 720p 360 games look like a dream on them u til you play them on a calibrated hd crt.
About input lag all the old hdmi inputs should have a edid dongle to handshake the signal.
The plasmas are really good to watch movies on.
I haven't had any problems with HDMI handshakes, but yeah, plasmas are definitely really fun for watching movies on. I'm revisiting my DVD and Blu-ray library a lot more now.
You conviced me to buy plasma, but there is something better... DLP projectors, TVs are more rare. I bought a 720p Optoma HD 65 for X360 (at 2009) and it was jaw dropping for everyone. Am sure You can buy even low resolution one for very low price (not sure if there are such low as 480p but I've seen 1024x768 )
I forgot to ask last time if you are able to notice any "rainbow effect" on that projector. I remember noticing it a bit in school/college on the various DLPs. I could never really appreciate them since the rooms were never very dark -- plus they were data projectors. It definitely sounds like something fun to try out, and I love how it's portable. I'll be keeping an eye out at thrift shops from now on instead of passing by them without much thought.
@@Dreamroom64 mostly, I've seen rainbow effect when moving head quickly from side to side (shaking) or moving hands quickly on front of me- on screen. Maybe some people are more sensitive to this kind of pictures, but me and few of my friends using this projektor, never complaint.
There are so many models, becouse of DLP evolution, and many models that cost 10k $$$ fifteen years ago now worth 50-100$.
Anyway, if You really want to be sure, that rainbow effect is low, buy a projektor with six segment colour wheel, like in my classic BenQ w 1080ST+ (short throw) it's great 1080p 60Hz (limited Hz to those days and HDMI connection) and it's just 24ms input lag!
BenQ W- 1070/+/1075, 1080ST/+/1085ST, are just generations (mostly better brightness/lamp and it's lifetime) and ST is just Short Throw version.
You can find a lot models, even for gaming - depend on age and price.
If you want to have a bright projector buy one with 3500 ANSI Lumens (Lumens from trade Mark :)
There are also ALR screens, and You can just watch projector on bright room! Only that it cannot be on front of window/s or light sources and... they are expensive. I'm fighting with myself to buy one, but it's around 500$ for around 80 inch screen (depend on material used)
anyway- good luck - it's worth to check it ;)
What do you do for a living, if you don't mind me asking?
I've worked in accounting most of my career. What's really important is that I keep my expenses low and carry no high-interest debt. I splurge a bit for my game room but always look for deals and the best values. I do a lot of thrifting and patient shopping. Outside of my core hobbies, I'm pretty stingy hah.
I kept my Pioneer 50 “ plasma , way better to game on
Panasonic and Pioneer are the best TVs. Even today Panasonic rains supreme amongst Sony, LG and Samsung
Nah crts is where it’s at, plasmas are nice but in my experience they’ve either ran hot, worry about imagine burn in and definitely latency issue. I can’t recommend my Oled enough for modern gaming and the charm on crt/pvm monitors
My main complaint about HD CRTs is how poor the geometry is, save for maybe the best Sony. Also, the first two that I owned couldn't even take a 720p signal, so PS3 gaming on them was limited to 480p for a huge chunk of the library. HD CRTs also don't work with light guns, so they don't have anything on plasma in this regards to this like an SD CRT.
Plasma gives very good motion clarity with perfect geometry, less bulk, larger sizes, and its own picture quality charm. And I like how available plasmas are right now and the fact that I can even pick up my 50" Kuro without help. My solo CRT weightlifting abilities top out at about the 27" Tau shown in the video hah.
Anyway, I plan to stick with my Sony PVM CRT for 240p gaming. It's definitely the best tool for that job. I just think that plasmas are arguably the best tool for the job for most folks when it comes to Xbox 360 and PS3 gaming. The games on this gen aren't so sensitive to a couple frames of lag. DVDs are especially nice on plasmas as well.
@ I guess it’s each to their own, I personally never liked the look on plasma, and just the idea of burn in alone always kept me steer clear. Hd crt’s yes are terrible for gaming imo, but to each their own, maybe I’ll give another chance to the plasma if I come across a cheaper one
8:38 take that sony badge off the oev. it's like putting a Subaru badge on a saab 93x.
@@LanceHayabusa I'd be OK with the Olympus badge if it looked better. The Olympus badge is a cheap rectangle, and the model is truly just a Sony with a different paint job.
Love that TV stand 😮
Agreed, it's really cool. I was looking for something that I could place there without being too bulky or closing the room off. It happened to have the right wood color tone out of the box! I had to modify it a bit to fit my plasma monitor and have a couple more ideas to enhance it, which I'll show later on.