Plasma Televisions

Along with LCD televisions, plasma screen televisions are the creme de le creme of TVs. Both have their pros and cons. Whether you go for a plasma TV or LCD TV is down solely to personal taste.

Plasma television prices start at around £1000 for a 42 inch screen. Expect to pay £3,600 for a top of the range model with a 50 inch screen.

A major potential problem with plasma screens is burn in. Simply put, burn-in is a damaged pixel, whose phosphors have been prematurely aged and therefore glow less intensely than those of surrounding pixels. The reason is that the damaged pixel has developed a "memory" of the colour information that was repeatedly fed to it in a static manner over a long period of time. And that phosphor colour information has actually become seared into the plasma-screen glass. Hence the term "burn-in."

Once these phosphors are damaged, they cannot give the same output as the other phosphors around them do. But pixels do not suffer burn-in singly. Burn-in occurs in the shape of a static image that persists on TV screens -- things like network logos, computer icons, Internet browser frames, etc.