LCD Killed The Plasma Screen

Anyone walking around the floor of CES 2007 could clearly see that LCD has won, and Plasma Displays are dead. The plasma guys like Panasonic (PC) are fighting a rear guard action to extract returns on their sunk Plasma investment costs. Plasma will will ship fewer incremental panels as demand for large size flat panels explode, and absolute market share for Plasma will plunge. I don’t expect to see any additional investment by manufacturers in Plasma.

What few plasmas were on display all trumpeted support for 1080p, a tacit admission that the marketing war waged by Sony (SNE) and Sharp to make this a consumer requirement has been successful.

The death of plasma is not a surprise. But I suspect the DLP, the brainchild of TI (TXN) will meet the same fate as large screen LCD pricing continues to drop and quality improves. Sharp had outstanding quality 46″ panels that are below $2500 today.

The biggest impact this trend towards LCD has is virtually all large displays sold one year from now will support 1920×1080 pixels, perfect for high resolution computing applications. This new display interface in the living room is just begging to be put to use, and I suspect that CES 2008 and CES 2009 will showcase new companies that do exactly that.

Part of a CES 2007 Summary series. Click Here for a full archive.

Full Disclosure: Author owns shares in Sony