Three Strikes and You’re Out: Samsung Ending Plasma TVs

Well, no one should be too surprised at this, but it appears Samsung is joining Panasonic (and Pioneer, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Runco…) as the latest HDTV manufacturer to call it quits on the plasma TV business. That leaves only LG.

As you probably remember, last year Panasonic, known at the time for making the industry’s best-performing television (the ZT60), pulled the plug on those plasma TVs to focus solely on LED LCD TVs. Samsung is now joining them, reports Reuters, which states the reason as “the decline in overall demand for plasma display panel televisions.”

This is something that continues to baffle people in the home theater business. Let’s make this clear—plasma TVs (mostly) produce better pictures than LCD TVs, even LED LCD TVs. There are some LEDs that come close, very close, but those have always been the most expensive models. Plasma looks better and cost less (check out this 64-inch plasma for $1,2999).

What part of that didn’t the buying public understand?

Now the only plasma TV maker left is LG, who no doubt also has plans to scrap its plasma business.

Another likely reason, aside from consumer lack of interest, is the move to 4K. The entire TV manufacturing business is transitioning to Ultra HD 4K TVs, and that’s not a transition that plasma panels make easily. What kind of message would Samsung (or anyone else, for that matter) be able to make about picture quality if they sold top-performing plasmas but pushed more expensive LED 4K sets at the same time?

So with plasma TV’s end of the road soon upon us, what can we hope for next? What about OLED? OLED TVs are our hope for a truly awesome display technology, and the examples we’ve seen so far, mostly from Samsung and LG, have been as impressive as we could want. But they’re also crazy expensive. Samsung earlier this year made motions that it’s OLED adventures were going to move a little slower than previously expected (see here), but LG, on the other hand, pledged a whole lotta new OLED products. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Finally, the change isn’t happening immediately. According to the Reuters article Samsung will keeping making plasma TVs until November (probably to have them available for the holiday sale season).

By the way, we have a 65-inch Samsung 8550 Ultra HD LED TV in for review, which will be posted soon.

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