Question:

Should I buy a plasma or LCD/DLP projector for my home theatre?

Plasma Screens: Plasma Size Limitations

If you are looking for a dramatically large movie screen for your home theatre, you need to look beyond plasma screens. Look to home theater projectors. LCD and DLP projectors are capable of turning your home theatre room into a true cinema-like environment. Plasma screens today are topping out at a little over 60 inches diagonal.
With a home theatre projector, you can project twice that large and more! If you have a large enough room that you can put your LCD or DLP projector further back, you can project an image as large as your living room wall!

Plasma Screens: Cost more than home theater projectors

Plasma screens are a fantastic technology both for video projectors and data. It allows very bright true images and takes up very little space since it hangs from your wall.

So what are the drawbacks? There are actually a few drawbacks to this technology that might make you want to consider a home theater projector over a plasma screen. First, they are incredibly expensive. A 60" diagonal plasma will run over $8,000.00 and can weigh over 100 lbs. This means you must have a special plasma mount hung on a reinforced beam for it to not come crashing down on your floor and turning into the most expensive paperweight ever made.

Want to compare plasma screens to home theater projectors? Home theater projectors are becoming increasingly affordable. Ranging in price from less than a thousand dollars to $6000 for a phenomenal home theater projector, you'll still have enough money to buy a premium sound system with the money you save over buying a plasma screen.

Plasma Screens: Image Burn

Not only do plasma screens burn out over time, an image can also get burned into a plasma screen. Let's say you are a weather junkie. You wake up in cold sweats because you just can't stop watching The Weather Channel. First of all, you have bigger problems than image burn at this point, but I digress. When watching a station such as this, for advertising purposes, the station will leave a logo in one of the upper or lower corners all of the time. When left on this channel for a few hours, The Weather Channel logo will eventually burn right into the plasma screen. This logo could appear no matter what you watch on the plasma screen.

On the other hand, home theater projectors do not have this problem of image burn. Pause your video and leave the room for a week and the image will not be burned on the projector or the screen.

Plasma Screens: Life Expectancy

Plasma screens, just like the lamps in a LCD or DLP projector have a set life to them and will eventually burn out. Most plasma screens have a life of 20,000-30,000 hours. Now this may seem like a lot, but again there are some things you should know. Plasma brightness is identical to the way UHP lamps in projectors work…on half-lives. At 10,000 hours you will be at half the brightness you started with, and at the full 20,000 or 30,0000 hours the image will be so dark and distorted, that it is actually no longer watchable.

In comparison, a home theater projector has a 2,000 hour lamp. Changing a lamp is a fraction of the cost of replacing an entire plasma screen.

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Thanks
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