Plasma TV Displays - The History Of Plasma Display TV

The first prototype for a Plasma Display TV was invented in July 1964 by professors Donald Bitzer, Gene Slottow and Robert Willson at the University of Illinois.

A Plasma display TV is an emissive flat panel display where light is created by phosphors energized by a plasma discharge between two flat panels of glass. These three inventers researched plasma displays as an alternative to cathode-ray tube-based television sets being used.

A cathode-ray display has to constantly refresh and was bad for displaying computer graphics. First plasma display panel was of one single cell but today’s plasma televisions use millions of cells carrying high-definition television (HDTV) into millions of homes. Few companies stuck with plasma display until another flat-panel display technology was introduced.

By 1967, the inventors had invented how to achieve good memory margin using just neon, and they developed the driving circuitry to address the large array of pixels. That year they built a 16 x 16 panel that glowed orange and these displays became widely used in Japan.

With the introduction of LCD or liquid crystal display, it became possible to make up television with flat screens also, and this put an end to commercially developing plasma displays for next few years, due to cost factor and several other cases. While many companies were successful to manufacture different sizes of plasma displays through early 2000, during the year 2006 to 2008, Panasonic introduced with 103 inches plasma display, which is the third largest display in the world, and this was marketed by Jumbo Electronics in Dubai.

In these years plasma TVs were overtaken by LCDs, but in the 40-inch series and above slice plasma displays established the control over the market shares. LCD technology was most suited to small size televisions only whereas plasma technology was highly competitive in large sizes.