Hearing 'plasma TV' spoken is a rare occurrence nowadays. After all, the television panel technology hasn't been in production – or on shop shelves – for years. While you won't find plasma TVs for sale now, with the market dominated by LCDs and OLEDs, there are still some who own or trade them, their particular picture traits remaining sought after by some aficionados even now. Plasma TVs may not feature in our current best TVs list, but they did many a time in years past.
If you're, ahem, experienced enough to recall the arrival of plasma panels, you may remember they came at a time when traditional tube TVs were on the way out. In fact, they helped precipitate that. Sure we had "flat screens" before then, but these referred to the lack of convex shape to the TV front, still packing a deep square Cathode Ray Tube box behind that. Plasma was the dawning of the age of true, slim flatscreen TVs.
