It’s not uncommon for people to gloss over evolutionary steps in technology, and I have to admit, even I’m guilty of that sometimes. Lately I’ve been touching on the development of TVs over the years, including LCD, OLED, and mini-LED panels, but I almost forgot about the existence of a format that was once state-of-the-art: plasma. That’s strange, in a sense, because I remember a brief time when the word “plasma” had a distinct cachet among TV shoppers.
If that tech was once leading the market, though, what happened to it? Why aren’t there new generations of plasma sets on shelves at your local big-box retailer, and is there any way at all to buy a new one? There are some concrete answers to all of these questions, although I also want to take some time to give plasma its due.
What is a plasma TV?
Ahead of its time
The term “plasma” probably invokes futuristic images, and from a certain perspective, the technology is still pretty exotic. Structurally, a plasma TV sandwiches millions of cells between two layers of glass. These cells are full of a gas that turns into light-emitting plasma (an ionized state of matter) when excited by electricity — hence the name. It’s possible to change color and brightness based on how this charge is delivered.
When plasma TVs first debuted in 1997, they were extremely expensive, but a major leap over the CRT (cathode ray tube) TVs that were common at the time. It was possible to scale plasma TVs up to then-massive sizes, measuring 40 to 50 inches or more, in no small part because you didn’t need a larger tube to match. They were even thin and light enough to mount on a wall, which was miraculous in an era when lifting a 40-inch CRT was a two- or three-person job.
Plasma TVs were able to produce better contrast, simply shutting off cells to turn them black, much like OLED. You additionally gained fast response times, great color saturation, and wide viewing angles.
The tech also beat out early generations of LCDs in a few ways. Without the need for a backlight, plasma TVs were able to produce better contrast, simply shutting off cells to turn them black, much like OLED. You additionally gained faster response times, greater color saturation, and wider viewing angles, potentially making plasma better for group events like movie night or The Big Game.
By the early 2000s, plasma had finally become affordable enough for ordinary people to buy. The tech also continued to develop — for some shoppers, a plasma TV was likely their first introduction to 720p HD, or later, 1080p. And something that might amaze you is that some models achieved refresh rates up to 600Hz, whereas 144Hz is considered impressive on a modern OLED or mini-LED panel.
With all this going for it, you might think that plasma could’ve continued evolving for decades. By the end of 2014, however, all the major TV manufacturers had stopped production, the last holdout being LG.
Why did plasma production stop?
A story of pressure from both sides
Ultimately, progress with LCDs is probably to blame. To begin with, TV makers never really solved problems with plasma’s low production yields, which inflated the cost of manufacturing. This expense was passed on to consumers. On the flip side, LCDs became easy to produce, and increasingly affordable in stores. LCDs are so cheap today that you can buy a 75-inch model for less than $600.
Simultaneously, the performance gap began to shrink. My first smart TV was a 40-inch Sharp LCD I bought in 2011, and that was good enough that I kept it around for over a decade. Sure, its refresh rates were pathetic next to plasma — but it offered 1080p, excellent colors, and solid viewing angles. I might’ve kept on using it in some capacity if it hadn’t developed a line of damaged pixels.
In fact, plasma never escaped a few serious limitations, one being high power consumption. As you might guess, converting gas into plasma isn’t exactly efficient. EcoFlow claims that while a 60-inch LCD with an LED backlight might consume about 88W or so, an equivalent plasma TV can draw 500W. That’s almost twice as much as the OLED-based gaming laptop I’m writing this on. Depending on local US energy rates, having that plasma model on for just four hours a day might hypothetically cost you anywhere from $80 to over $300 per year.
Plasma never escaped a few serious limitations, including burn-in, weight, power consumption, and production costs.
Plasma is also infamous for the risk of burn-in. Indeed, that’s really how the term first caught on, long before OLED screens proliferated. High power usage translates into high heat, and the phosphor coating essential to the tech prone to wearing out unevenly if something like a channel logo or game interface is onscreen for too long. Various measures were put into place to try to counteract burn-in, much as with OLED — but that doesn’t seem to have satisfied the public.
LCDs also became brighter than plasma TVs, and lighter. While that 40-inch Sharp I bought was still fairly thick and heavy, LCDs were rapidly thinning at that point, making them more convenient to move and mount. That might seem like a trivial benefit if you’re used to the TVs we have in the 2020s — but even that Sharp product was tough to carry upstairs by myself, never mind something heavier.
Can you buy a plasma TV today?
No surprises here
Not a new one. You may stumble across official product pages here and there on the web, but these are either relics or purely for support purposes. As I mentioned, major brands stopped production in 2014, and any others that may have existed seem to have given up in the intervening years. If you want to buy a plasma TV in 2026, you’ll have to shop the preowned market.
I’d recommend against that. It’s unlikely that you’ll find a unit in mint condition, and with a used one there’s a chance of ending up with a dud, affected by burn-in or some other technical problem. Anything you can locate is going to be at least 12 years old, after all, and possibly stored in conditions with excess heat, moisture, or dust.
It’s unlikely that you’ll find a unit in mint condition, and with a used one there’s a chance of ending up with a dud, affected by burn-in or some other technical problem.
Perhaps most importantly, tech has moved on considerably in that span of time. Most of the models I can see on eBay are sized at 50 inches or under, and no plasma anywhere is equipped for 4K, Dolby Atmos, eARC, or even HDR — the HDR10 standard arrived in 2015. You’re going to have a distinctly underwhelming experience unless your goal is simply to experience what the cutting edge of TVs was when Obama was President and Ye was still Kanye.
You’ll get some sense of what plasma is (or was) like by buying an OLED TV. But that tech could be poised to face its own extinction in the next several years — RGB mini-LED beats it in color accuracy, while MicroLED merges that with perfect contrast. And both of those formats are immune to burn-in.
