HD TVs

[Brentastic]

Um, no they are not.

 

They have to meet new energy guidelines (like the TC-P50G10 does) but they are not phasing out anything. A few companies jumped out of the market over the last year but once you get to 50+ inches, plasmas are the best bang for your buck. We are talking about less than 500w. Do you have recessed cans in your house with incandescent bulbs? Typical can light runs a 65W BR40 lamp. That means if you took 10 - 15 of those down and installed CFLs you could run your plasma at the highest output constantly and have the same energy bill. There is also something to the difference in energy draw between LCDs and Plasmas. An LCD takes constant wattage no matter what it displays. A black screen takes the same energy as a white screen. Now, a plasma works differently where it takes more wattage to display a white screen, but it can do darker scenes for very low wattage. I've been tempted to buy a kill-a-watt meter just for work/home/hobby use but if I pick one up after getting my new plasma I'll let you know what it runs. My guess is that it is less than 300W that it runs most of the time and that would be very easy to offset with CFL bulbs in the house. Again though, we only pay around 5 cents a kWH locally. Many places it is much higher (national average is over 10 cents) so I suppose this could be a big deal to some (Cali). I think Plasmas just have a bad wrap from their earlier technology (burn in, IR). The deals you can get on them now are pretty sweet as I'll probably be paying around 800 for my 50 inch 720p set.

Good post.

 

What are CFLs? Are they a type of high efficiency light bulb? I may have to get some.

[Big John]

Good post.

 

What are CFLs? Are they a type of high efficiency light bulb? I may have to get some.

CFL = Compact Fluorescent Light