What Killed Panasonic Plasma TV? 4K Ultra HD (Or Lack Thereof)

“Will they? Won’t they?” Years of speculation about whether Panasonic will pull the plug on its loss-making plasma TV division came to an end last month, when the Japanese manufacturer officially announced that it’s going to stop making plasma display panel (PDP) by the end of this year, with sales of both consumer and commercial plasma TVs scheduled to end on the 31st of March 2014. As industry experts reflect on the demise of yet another class-leading lineup of television sets (just like the critically acclaimed Pioneer Kuro before it), it has transpired that 4K Ultra HD, or lack thereof, was the main factor behind Panasonic’s plasma exit.

Panasonic plasma TV

A Panasonic USA senior employee, who posts exclusively on the HighDefJunkies forum under the username “avjunkie”, has revealed that the significant amount of resources required to develop a consumer-grade 4K plasma TV was the final nail in the coffin for the company’s PDP business:

The main reason we have to move on is technology hit a roadblock. We simply cannot make a 4k plasma in a reasonable manner for retail without significant investment…

Plasma Cell Structure

To understand why it’s so difficult – if not impossible – to build a realistically-sized plasma TV (say, 55 or 65 inches) for the average home, let us first look at the inner workings of a plasma screen. Each PDP is made up of millions of plasma cells held between a front and a rear glass plate. The cells contain a mixture of 10% xenon and another chemically stable gas such as neon, which is maintained at around half atmospheric pressure.

Plasma cell structure
Plasma cell structure (image credit © Pioneer Corporation)

The rear glass plate is lined by address electrodes which are responsible for pixel/subpixel selection, whereas perpendicular rows of transparent display electrodes sit on top of the front glass plate. To generate colour, electrical current is passed through the gas mixture from the address electrodes to the display electrodes, ionising the gas into plasma. This emits ultraviolet (UV) light which is just beyond the visible spectrum for the human eye, but by design, each cell is coated with a coloured phosphor – typically red, green or blue – which will glow once hit by the UV light, resulting in what we perceive as colour.

Pixel Pitch

As we discuss the technical difficulties in the production of 4K plasma televisions, another key concept to grasp is that of pixel pitch, which refers to the distance between the centre of one pixel to the centre of an adjacent pixel. If there is no space between each pixel, then the pixel pitch would be equal to the pixel size. However, this is not the case for plasma displays, where each colour-emitting region has to be separated from the next by a barrier rib.

Pixel pitch illustration

Now let’s have some hard numbers. A current 65-inch, full HD Panasonic plasma with a native screen resolution of 1920×1080, for example the 65″ VT65/VT60, has a pixel pitch of 0.747mm. The smallest pixel pitch ever recorded on a commercially available plasma TV is 0.48mm, found on every single 42-inch full HD 1080p Panasonic plasma like the TX-P42ST60. In order to squeeze twice the number of pixels both horizontally and vertically into a 65in screen with 3840×2160 resolution, plasma television makers have to somehow find a way to halve pixel pitch down to about 0.32mm, which is 33% smaller than the smallest pixel pitch on record for a publicly purchasable PDP. Tall order.

Technical Challenges

A smaller plasma cell would increase the proportion of ionised atoms lost at the wall surfaces, hence reducing the luminous efficacy of the UV light exciting the phosphors. To maintain a similar level of brightness, more voltage would be required to energise the gas mixture, leading to higher power consumption. Also, the intracell gas pressure has to be doubled to approximately atmospheric pressure not only to suppress atomic losses, but also to maintain discharge stability.

58in 4K plasma
58in UHD plasma prototype (image credit © NHK STRL)

Despite these seemingly insurmountable technical challenges, Panasonic and Japanese national broadcaster NHK have actually succeeded in developing a 58-inch plasma prototype with 3840×2160 resolution and a pixel pitch of merely 0.33mm. It didn’t go into mass production (and never will, now that Panasonic has called time on its plasma venture), but there exists another major barrier which would have prevented the 4K plasma panel from going on sale, at least in the UK and Europe.

Energy Regulation

Since 2010, the European Union (EU) has been introducing stricter and stricter energy efficiency standards for TV sets, with the aim of phasing out the manufacturing, import and sales of power-hungry models. As of the 1st of April 2012, the EU’s ecodesign requirements for televisions states that:

the on-mode power consumption of a television with visible screen area A expressed in dm2 shall not exceed 16 Watts + A * 3.4579 Watts/dm2

A 65in widescreen TV has a screen area of 116.47 dm2, according to this excellent TV screen size comparator and an online conversion tool. Plugging the number into the EU’s equation gives us a maximum power consumption of 419 watts.

Earlier this year, we measured 304 watts from a calibrated Panasonic TX-P65VT65B 1080p plasma. Considering that a 4K plasma features four times the number of pixels that need to be driven, not to mention a smaller pixel pitch which will demand more energy to deliver the same brightness, we’d say there’s virtually no chance of a 4K Ultra HD plasma TV keeping under the EU’s power consumption limit, unless manufacturers dim down the default, out-of-the-box picture mode so much that it’s unusable for normal viewing.

Similar energy legislations are enforced elsewhere too, making 4K plasmas all but a pipe dream. For example, in the state of California effective 1st of January 2013, the maximum power consumption allowed for TVs below the size of 58 inches is 0.12 * screen area (in2) + 25 watts. For a 55-inch TV, that’s 180 watts. The most recent 55in full HD plasma we’ve reviewed, the Panasonic TX-P55VT65B, has already gone past this limit with a measured power usage of 260 watts in its calibrated mode – a UHD plasma television won’t stand a chance.

Final Words

Had 4K not rolled into town hailed as the next big thing for the TV industry, Panasonic might have chugged along with its plasma display business for another year or two. But faced with numerous technological and legislative obstacles to bring a 4K plasma to market, the Japanese company finally decided to throw in the towel as far as PDP is concerned. And we don’t blame them, not when OLED panels – which consume significantly less power than plasmas, and can be inkjet-printed – present an infinitely more attractive proposition for the mass production of 4K Ultra HD TVs. It’s time to say goodbye to Panasonic plasmas, and we cannot accuse them of not going out on a high.

14 comments

  1. But surely we don’t need 4K/UHD Plasma for most TVs IE 65″ and below.

  2. Yeah they could have started their 4k sizes at 84 inch and left the smaller sizes for 1080p. 4k under that size isn’t useful snyway

  3. The technical arguments for not being able to produce 4K plasma are not the only reason for
    an exit of plasma by Panasonic. Its nonsense to talk of 4K as being a viable commercial proposition – there
    is very little content and no broadcast platforms as yet.
    One hopes that consumers the world over have learnt from their experience of Panasonic ‘quality’
    and aftersales to think twice before investing in any expensive 4K hardware from this corporation.

  4. the reason that panasonic pulls the plug on plasma is you peoples who purchased lcd tvs .

  5. It’s a fact of life for manufacturers that consumer products have got to comply with the energy saving needs of their customers. The ever increasing cost of energy is an unavoidable impost for most people so the more influential countries such as the USA will make it harder for Japan and especially China to control the market as they once did. What does it mean for R&D?, well I think that will depend on how far WiFi Tablet technology is prepared to go to eventually supersede TV as a primary source of video streaming entertainment.

  6. We live in a wonderful times: havnig a Reference level TV with Full HD is a mere “roadblock”, while producing crappy 4K LCDs is called the “next big thing”…

  7. Oh please. 4K TV has had absolutely no impact on anything. Nobody cares about it or wants it. You need a 80″+ projector screen to justify it. There’s little real material and little chance of it for a good few years yet. It’s merely a means to get everyone to upgrade their equipment again, having failed miserably with 3D.

    The real truth was published here some months ago in the news that plasma sales are a couple of percent of the TV market. That fact we can put down to 90% of people care more about price than image quality, not helped by some over-inflated media coverage of why “plasmas are bad”.

    I hope to God that OLED delivers what it promises and becomes affordable soon, otherwise we’re stuck with the lowest common denominator of cheap LCD panels with lots of whizzy internet features but poor picture.

  8. 4K killed the plasma star!

  9. I must admit that even though our current TV is a 2010 58″ Samsung plasma, our next TV will be an LED LCD TV because we pay a huge 25 cents per KW/hr for electricity and the Govt has been and will continue pushing up power prices 5% every year to encourage more efficient appliances, less green house gases produced and lessen the load on the power plants.

    That’s why I have been disappointed with the small amount of progress plasma has made in the power consumption area the last few years. Especially when you consider that I want our next TV to be 65″.

  10. I really hope OLED takes over, I saw a 4K TV in a store the other day, and where I could see a more detailed picture, it’s still kind of pointless, this was like a 65″ TV, anything less then that is too small to matter in my opinion, and even that may be too small. Plasma just delivers the best picture quality, it’s just a shame the cost a lot to run, however if OLED TV’s become affordable within the next few years then everyone will win, from what I have read, they should cost less to run, and have the ultimate in picture quality, not too mention for all those who do other stuff on their TV’s(stuff that isn’t watching TV or movies), they will obviously have all the latest features and they are suppose to be unbelievable thin. Now if only they didn’t cost a fortune.

  11. ok …4K is the reason, we accept….then we want more FullHD plasmas.

  12. I do not get the higher power consumption argument.
    As there is 4-times more pixels covering the same area on a 4k display as opposed to a 2k display, each 4k pixel only need 1/4th the luminosity to achieve the same per area brightness.
    So, unless there is more than 1/4th the power required to achieve 1/4th of the lumens in 4k pixel, what is the problem ?

  13. Energy consumption regulations are a complete joke. They are legislated sacrifice to the gods. And so just like Beta and 35mm projection, another superior format goes the ways of marketing and ignorance.

    If vinyl can make a come-back perhaps so can film and plasma but I’m pessimistic because of the economies of scale required.

    How absurd that our grandparents will have a better viewing experience than our grandchildren.

    The scourge of modernism.