Gaming On A $69 (Nice) Plasma TV In 2022

I tried gaming on a cheap Plasma TV and was really surprised by the results.

Some interesting articles with info about Plasma TVs:

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[opathoris]

Dawid, the picture mode was set to Cinema mode initially - you need to change that to Game mode. Cinema mode is designed for dark rooms and adds a slightly warm color feel to it. I'm still using a Pioneer Kuro 5010 and the picture is still incredible. AVSForum might have recommended color and sharpness settings for that set.

[Dudebrotheguy]

The first time I saw a plasma tv in 2007 it blew my mind
Seeing an amazingly vivid 40 inch plasma after spending most of my life looking at a 19 inch crts was magic

[michaelcoe]

Plasma, more than any other TVs, benefit from calibration. I also noticed that in the menu, the color balance had been set to Cinema, which is biased for dark rooms and accurate 'movie' display, rather than gaming. The LG Plasma did, I believe, have a gaming mode, which turns off most of the image processing. Being a TV, it was always designed first-and-foremost for reproducing TV and movie input, and even now, a Plasma has pretty much the best frame-to-frame refresh for HD input, and in a darkened room, make for a great, cheap, cinematic experience.

For reference of where my knowledge comes from, I sold TVs and other electronics for ten years at Sears. I watched as the last CRTs disappeared, projection TVs faded away, and TV prices plummet from $4000+ for a 50in dumb Plasma TV down to less than $800 for a 55in smart LED-lit LCD. Plasma TVs deserve a little love, as they brought larger screens to more consumers, and pushed the prices down to more reasonable levels. There was a time when a 60in was an extravagance of the filthy rich. Now you can get a cheap 60in smart TV that outperforms those early TVs by leaps and bounds, and for less than 20% of what those early models would have cost.

[ank]

Dawid: Have you read the thousands of comments talking about changing from Cinema Mode to Game Mode and calibrating the TV well? Yes? Ok, good. Just wanted to make sure 😂

[bara]

Just replaced our old plasma like 2 months ago. I'm confident that the brightness issue doesn't apply to all plasmas, as both our old Panasonic and Samsung TVs were crazy bright and had vibrant colours

[bartekpekala]

HDMI isn't really an indicator of age anymore, my 2005 TV has one.

[tonelemoan]

I had a 50" plasma for a few years: Nice big (duh), bright image. Visible purple trails on quickly changing pixels though so the inverse of what your camera is showing. Also, the LED I replaced it with used just 25% of the electricity (!) With fuel prices in Europe currently going mad, I would add a large caveat that if you plan on using a plasma to save money - it's going to be a false economy! Would be interesting to see how many watts this is pulling with an Energenie or something. I think mine was 440W peak which is just stupid. Those clunks you heard on start-up were probably some heavy duty capacitors getting ready for lift-off!

[Birdman_in_CLE]

My 2008 Samsung plasma that is still in use part time in the basement had great blacks and really vibrant colors. This TV must be a mess from overuse or just a really bad set from the factory.
The downside to high end plasma is they pull as much power as a small city and give off a ton of heat.

[AnnaDoes]

2:30 I swear I’ve thrown out all your decade-old undies by now🤣😋

[tbz]

LG Plasmas were also always considered toward the low end. I’ve had a 42” Panasonic for 20 years and is still an amazing picture.

[Cornelius]

My living room tv is still a plasma, it was one of the later ones and I still think it has the best image out of all my other TVs. It seems brighter and has better colors and the refresh rate is crazy, something like 500hz I believe. The only downside is it's only 720p and the viewing angles are bad when sunlight hits it.

[makuIa]

as a poor student who’s gamed on old TV’s my whole life. you’ll be surprised how impressed you’ll be by a decade old $200 TV from an $900 4K IPS monitor

[SpongyWhale]

I game on a 20 year old, 49", high spec for the time plasma that I picked up for £100. I like it a lot.

[bramvandenbroeck]

I have a panasonic plasma tv and it works great, it has some settings for latency and color correction and it is indeed a bit different than lcd or oled, but the model i have was one of the best you could get at that time, it even has a digital tv tuner in it for dvb so honestly a nice experience from something this old!

[markmacknight]

I've just recently upgraded to an oled from a plasma. Specifically the Panasonic VT50 and it was an amazing TV. I played my series X on it before upgrading and the colour reproduction was excellent, blacks were as good as my oled and input lag was in the low 20ms. All in all and excellent TV for movies and gaming.

[shadymf]

Just came here to say that I absolutely adore my calibrated Panasonic ST60 Plasma and I will not replace it until it dies, an OLED is the only thing that can touch it in terms of black levels and natural sharpness.

As another note, older Plasmas lacked from the benefit of modern screen coatings to help with wash out and reflections... The last few years of Plasma, mostly by Samsung and Panasonic had really great screen coatings that made them great for daytime viewing.

[MikeStavola]

Yeah, the fact that it was used as an info display for like a decade is why it's worn out really badly. They looked better when new. Kinda like what happened with most CRTs that were used for decades, only on a shorter timetable.

[tbob]

The brightness setting on some of these TV's is actually more like a gamma setting, which could be why your image was so flat, if you're at like ~1.0 average gamma the image will have no punch to it at all.

Some very basic calibration (like getting that white point close to 6500) would probably help this TV out immensely even if it's not bright. 80 nits is still pretty bright in a completely dark room (movie theaters typically sit around 30-50nits, but dark room treatment, etc helps the image pop more)

Plasma TV's aren't as good at ANSI contrast compared to LCD. CRT is even worse at ANSI (100-150:1 generally) but I don't think it's a very realistic test. A more accurate contrast test would be a 10% white or grey window or just straight up native contrast (measuring native contrast on modern LCD TV's is not great because of dimming, etc). The most noticeable scenes where higher native contrast comes into play when most of the image is dark.

Of course OLED is still much better overall, but these older plasmas when set up right were a much better choice compared to LCD's at the time.

Edit: Another thing to note with some of these plasmas even though they accepted 1080p input they were actually only 1024x768 native resolution. That does not look like 1080p to me during the screen measurements section. 9:40

[Rockport]

I like when my monitor has built- in Antialiasing, gets some load off my GPU :)
Thanks dawid, never stop doing weird experiments.

[chadhunter]

I have this TV and have been using it go game on since I purchased it new. Other comments have touched on that there's a gaming mode and you really have to play with your settings to get the best picture, maybe do a recap at some point to show the best case for an old tv like this. Either way, another great video!