Content area
Full text
If I were allowed only one plasma screen, the NEC 61 MP1 is the one I'd take. With a 61-inch diagonal screen which makes for about 1,591 square inches of viewing pleasure-NEC has finally produced a plasma big enough for me. What can I say? I like big screens so I really like the size of the NEC's screen, but the weight (134.5 pounds) along with plasma's reputation for fragility is kind of scary for such a wide and perhaps easily tipped over unit. If God grants me my wish and a 61-inch plasma falls off a truck in front of me without breaking, I'll pay extra for a very careful installation crew to mount the thing permanently, up high on the strongest wall I've got. Just the thought of some kid falling against one resting on its skinny 17-inch wide tabletop stand makes me cringe.
Okay, enough of that-once it's set up, the biggest plasma on the block produces light, like all the other smaller ones-- by electrically exciting a gas surrounded by light-emitting red, green, and blue phosphors. The gas is trapped between two large (and heavy and very thick) pieces of glass that have had tiny phosphor-coated pixel chambers (about a thousand times smaller than the glass thickness) etched and trapped between the glass plates. The basic excitation mechanism is like the process used in a fluorescent lamp, since the plasma display's excited gas emits UV radiation that then excites the colored phosphors. The plasma display's image is therefore composed of light that makes its way out of each pixel's tiny glowing chamber buried between the thick glass plates. The relative difference in size between the glass plates and the lighted gas chamber contributes to some of the lack of electrical efficiency and brightness for plasmas, in general-well, that and the fact that you can only pump in so much power before even heavy glass cracks.
Anyway, the pixel chambers are separated from each other by ridges that hold the two pieces of glass a fixed distance apart. In the early plasma displays, the supporting and separating ridges pixels were much wider and gave early plasma's image a broken, stripped appearance. Modem plasmas like NEC's 61-inch use thin ridges that have little...