Mar
23
Plasma Television Longevity
Filed Under Plasma Television
Many don’t stop to consider the life expectancy of plasma televisions but there are a few things worth keeping in mind to ensure longest life-span possible from your new purchase. Unlike DLP’s, or even LCD’s to some extent, there’s no such thing as a plasma bulb replacement and there certainly isn’t any way to “re-charge” the gas in them, that one’s pure urban legend. Now once a plasma starts to dim there’s really nothing one can do to reverse the process but that’s not to say there aren’t ways to lengthen your plasma’s life-span.
Most new plasmas can last ten or more years if treated well but running one hot can cut that life-span considerably. Hot would entail running the brightness and or contrast wide open and or leaving static images onscreen for long periods of time. That’s not to say the plasma will just shut off like clockwork at the ten year mark, but by this time it will be significantly dimmer than when it was new.
60,000 hours or more aren’t unheard of with plasma televisions so don’t think of them as poor investments. It’s just the displays that are taken care of last longer but that goes for anything right? To put things into perspective let’s say the plasma does indeed give up the ghost at 60k hours, you’d probably go through twelve or more DLP lamps during the same time period; at an average cost of $400, that’s $4800 easily more than the plasma’s cost to begin with. So as you can see, just because a display has a finite life-span that doesn’t necessarily make it a poor investment.
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