Plasma vs. OLED 2023 | What a Difference a Decade Makes!

thanks to upway for sponsoring a portion of this video folks we are gonna have some fun today let's take a little trip down memory lane enjoy a little Nostalgia and along the way give ourselves a little perspective check today we're pitting the brightest plasma TV ever made versus one of today's best OLED TVs let's go [Music] welcome back everyone I'm Caleb Dennison and this is a video I've wanted to do for a very long time today we're going to pit Samsung's best plasma TV the F 8500 against Samsung's best TV to date the s95c QD OLED this is going to be so much fun if you like what we're up to here smash that like button and let me know about it down in the comments do you remember Plasma TV's fondly still using one at home I want to hear all about it so get in there and let us know okay let's get into this [Music] so let's rewind back to 2012. LG had just announced its first OLED TV a 55-inch model that would sell for ten thousand dollars they were light ridiculously thin had perfect black levels and impressive color it seemed like it might replace plasma one day but at 10 grand it was still a pipe dream for most folks plasma was still the better choice for video enthusiasts and that's where the Samsung F 8500 here comes in the f-8500 was the brightest plasma TV that had ever been made and it was a stunner in its day but you don't have to take my word for it let's see what a much younger Greener Caleb Dennison had to say about it this is not something you want to miss out on it's one of those TVs that people are going to be talking about five or six years from now because it's just that great now the Panasonic zt60 which I also reviewed seen here took the crown that year as best plasma TV but the F 8500 in this video I think makes a better comparison because it's the best and last plasma Samsung ever made and we get to put it against the best TV Samsung has made to date The s95c Cutie OLED now as we go forward keep in mind this TV came out just before the iPhone 5. and it was out a full year before the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One made their debuts people hadn't even started yelling at their connect cameras yet that's going to be relevant in a moment so if you're gaming on this Samsung plasma you were gaming on a PS3 or Xbox 360. hopefully if you had an Xbox 360 it was one that had an HDMI port otherwise you might have had the rock component video which this TV handled only with a breakout cable now the F 8500 here was one of the early smart-ish TVs I mean it had Wi-Fi and it has a smart TV interface sorta there are some apps available in fact I wonder if they still work yeah let's find out um sure enough Netflix loads and plays takes forever but there you go playing Netflix oh also there's this web browser that I remember being terrible and useless does that still work yeah looks like it kind of works unfortunately I don't have the cool silver remote with the swipe pad that made moving the cursor around a little bit easier but you know what I do have my hands yep before the Xbox Connect came out there was the F 8500 here with gesture control you just popped up this little camera which gives me some Eerie RoboCop Vibes and then you could wave your hands around clasping them clothes to select things and move them around I often wonder how long people toyed around with this before just giving it up because it was so sketch oh and let's not forget this is a 3D TV now Samsung was in the active 3D glasses Camp which meant that you had to charge or replace the batteries that powered the active shutters in the glasses sorry I don't have any of those around but well there's a reason this was one of the last 3D TVs and before all you 3D lovers out there get infuriated with me let me just say that I think now would be a fun time to bring at home 3D back but if they did it would need to be passive those active glasses caused flicker that I could not stand okay now let's get into the performance of this TV as we work our way up to making a comparison so the term we used to toss around a lot back then and still do to this day from time to time was Inky blacks plasma TVs had Inky blacks while the LED backlit LCD TVs of the day struggled to make blacks that were anything other than kind of a Milky gray in a perfectly dark room this TV does achieve perfect black levels with the right settings however once there is any light in the room as you will see for yourself the blacks take a hit because of the way the panel scatters ambient light as for brightness how bright was the brightest ever plasma well I didn't measure TVs back then but other reviewers claimed anything from 180 to just shy of 300 nits Believe It or Not 300 nits was Stellar in 2012 particularly for a plasma TB now I'm curious how this thing is doing today so I put it in Dynamic mode maxed out the cell luminance setting and the contrast and got a reading of 280 80 knits not too bad so it occurs to me for folks who may not be in tune with the peak brightness of today's premium TVs we expect them to hit at least 800 nits and the best TVs are flirting with like 2 000 to 3 000 knit levels so yeah things have changed quite a bit since then oh and I almost forgot this TV does not do HDR it is SDR only and it maxes out at 1080p resolution with a 60 hertz refresh rate also it runs the HDMI 1.4 B standard and that being the case I have to run separate video feeds on each of these TVs so please forgive me if I don't sync everything perfectly hey quick sidebar so I know a lot of folks who are really excited at the idea of getting an e-bike until they went shopping for one and got struck by a lightning bolt of sticker shock that's why I told them just like I'm telling you now about upway it's okay to get excited again because upway is a 100 online retailer of both new and pre-owned e-bikes that are 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quality pre-owned and new e-bikes from the Best Brands out there and you can save 200 on any purchase over 500 using our code down in the description thanks to upway for sponsoring this portion of our video now let's compare the two and a reminder the s95c is an HDR TV with a peak brightness rating of about 1300 nits so a full 1000 nits higher than the plasma is rated to hit and since it is an HDR TV it can produce far more colors in addition to being able to produce brighter colors I mean I'm going into this expecting the s95c OLED to blow the plasma out of the water so does it well let's start out with playing SDR content on both TVs and just for Grants I've restricted the resolution on the OLED to 1080p for now I've also intentionally limited the s95c's brightness so that it matches up to what the plasma can do and in a comparison like this where we've got most of the lights shut off the black levels don't appear to be all that different between the two TVs but as soon as we turn the studio lights back on in the room the plasma isn't going to appear to have perfect blacks but beyond that you can still see a lot of difference in the colors okay now let's take one of the gloves off the OLED now we're letting the s95c flex some of its brightness muscle and here you can see that it is getting brighter than the plasma but it isn't as super Stark a difference in SDR when the signal isn't indicating anything brighter than 100 nits there's not a lot of difference to see but when we switch to HDR the gloves are fully off and folks well I mean see for yourself now in this footage we've exposed the camera for the plasma TV so the OLED is going to look washed out to you but even then you can see that the plasma looks good but the OLED is over on the right pumping things out with some serious muscle actually the average Picture level for each TV is remarkably similar but now we're going to expose for the OLED and the plasma by comparison is going to look pretty dim now while the plasma doesn't look significantly dimmer in terms of average Picture level like I just mentioned the difference in the highlights is well folks it's not even close once we get into HDR the OLED just obliterates the plasma in all but one performance area the color on the OLED is wider in coverage richer more saturated and color brightness is on another level the contrast is significantly better on the OLED and as a result this glass of water looks crystal clear and pure on the OLED but dirty and murky by comparison on the plasma and the highlights folks now we've got a lot of footage here with water droplets involved and the Sparkle and depth on the OLED is amazing but on the plan asthma there is neither Sparkle nor death you know what's funny is that the s95c is now playing at 4K and the plasma at 1080p but the resolution isn't a part of the discussion it's the HDR the HDR is what makes all the difference at least at this 65-inch screen size I mean I'll just let the footage roll a bit longer so you can soak it in but there's no question you get way more TV for your money now than you did 11 years ago I mean there are mid-range LCD TVs today that would handily outperform the brightest plasma ever made there is however One Singular area in which the plasma appears to be superior but it isn't actually Superior it's because of its inferior brightness that it seems to be superior and that's with motion resolution particularly in scenes with complex and tight patterns take a look at Sarah in a hammock we've got the grid pattern of the hammock as well as the vertical lines of her blouse and as you you can see on the OLED we see some strobing kind of a flashing effect whereas the plasma looks nice and clean now the reason the OLED has this strobing effect is that its pixel response time is essentially instantaneous it lights up immediately and it's because it is capable of high brightness output immediately the movement of light from one pixel to the next has a strobing effect the Plasma's response time isn't quite fast enough and its brightness isn't quite high enough to create that same effect so it appears to be smoother you know I gotta say this Samsung plasma does a great job for an 11 year old piece of technology I think if we were to compare this plasma TV to a TV 10 years older than it the difference would be much more significant I mean we're hearkening back to CRT Davis right still once we set aside Nostalgia and the romanticization of the plasma era something by the way which I do regularly myself there's no denying that today's OLED TVs and in fact today's best mini LED backlit LCD TVs are a significant Step Up in some crucial aspects of picture quality I loved the Pioneer curo series it has an amazing Legacy I love the Panasonic St 60 and the pricier zt60 best plasma ever made and this Samsung F 8500 was certainly one for the books too but yeah we have seen some remarkable progress and having made this comparison it's clear to me that the biggest Improvement to our TVs has to be credited to HDR not resolution the brightness helps support the HDR Ambitions but HDR is about much more than just brightness it's about highlights and detail and depth and color I sure had fun making this video I hope you had a fun time watching it if you did would you let me know by slapping this video with a like subscribe if you'd like to see more I'll see you on the next one and until then here's two other videos I think you might like

Channel: Digital Trends

Views: 264,425

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Id: yjpKp4AVXdY

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023