What hurts Plasma tech the most?

After owning a Pioneer Kuro for awhile I ended up switching to a 42' Vizio Plasma, which as far as I know, was manufactured by LG. Anyway, I liked the Kuro, but it had a vertical viewing angle issue I found irritating and being as tinted as the Kuro was it didn't really have white levels that popped. Anyway, I have noticed that new Plasma's, particularly Panasonic's, tend to be very irritatingly dim in an interesting way. Sort of the same way my NEC XP29 hi-res monitors would look when displaying regular DVD/Blu-ray content. The blacks look amazing, though at the cost of the entire display looking, well not so great. Instinctively, I want to bump the gamma curve to something more logarithmic, and then crush the black levels just a little bit, but, well, you really can't on these new Panny's, and overall, the color response is fairly unnatural in the red-orange range.

The TV I am referring to is a U54 50" I just bought and returned, however, I have noticed this on many Plasma TV's. Let me first off say that my LG is SUPER bright, as bright as most CRT's, I can set the contrast to 53 out of 100 and it already looks great, a little messing with the brightness, color, tint and individual RGB levels (which are accessible in the regular menu) and it looks fantastic. The interesting thing about this Vizio/LG is that it is NOT tinted at all and it does not seem to have any current limiting effect on brightness AT ALL, whereas ALL newer sets clamp down HARD on full white scenes, or close to it. So what's the deal? Is it the power saving bs that I am contending with at this point, the tinting or both?

Admittedly my LG has mediocre black levels, but, the picture is SO natural, so bright, all the colors look "right", and most importantly it doesn't inspire me to squint at the TV like all of these modern plasmas do. My guess is that I will have to wait on OLED tech to finally give me what I am looking for, but, as for now, if I have the choice to watch TV on a Plasma, LCD, or CRT, well, I'd take the CRT hands down, but I'm starting to find that LCD, which doesn't have the "tinted" glass over the picture look or peak brightness compression issues that the new plasmas do is less irritating...something I NEVER thought I'd say. So, for now, I guess I am keeping the Vizio/LG plasma for the room and, as long as I am sitting right in the middle of TV in the living room (a Samsung LCD) I'll be ok for awhile; I just really wanted to replace the bothersome Samsung LCD in the living room with a Plasma, only to do so and find that, in no way do any newer plasma TV's compare to my Vizio/LG
Edited by soloist3 - 8/8/12 at 11:05pm

Yep, Kuro to the Vizio. I had them side by side for quite awhile, calibrated the Kuro to the best of my abilities, looked pretty good, but, the glass was SO tinted that the entire grayscale, while accurate, did not compete at all with the Sony XBR HD CRT (ok, that one is obvious) that it replaced, or the Panasonic I also had at the time, plus the vertical viewing angle "dimming" was irritating to me. Not saying the Kuro was by any means a poor quality display, it just didn't live up to the hype. I found my eyes much preferred the more animated look of my CRT and VIzio plasma so, yes, I sold it.

What I was more interested in finding out, is, can you defeat the current limiting "eco power saving" modes on any of these Plasma's? I know that some Plasma's have an adjustment for a "power save" mode, but, it is not the same thing as what I am talking about. On my Vizio plasma, or HD CRT's, when an intense white scene appears, there is no compression or brightness limiting, whereas on the Kuro and other displays you can actively see it limit the brightness, as the compression effect takes a few miliseconds to actually fully compress the scene?

I find this SO irritating, I would rather have my POS Vizio, with CRT like, consistent white levels across every scene with mediocre black levels than, a TV with fantastic black levels and visual clamping of white levels as I see with all the newer Plasmas.

This sort of reminds of emissions controlling engines in the 80's, lots of great designs got choked and lost tons of torque/hp because of emissions standards. Frankly, I don't care if my plasma uses twice the power of an LCD, I want it to look like how plasmas used to look, consistent in types of scenes

Also, I don't mean to offend the Kuro purists, they are great plasma's, just not for me...CRT's and oddly this strange Vizio plasma are so far the only displays I don't have to sit and continually adjust to make look good with every type of content I put through them, which says a lot because I am extremely picky about my displays, that's a huge psychological relief for me, the Kuro took adjusting "on the fly" depending on what I was watching, which I hated (then again, it definitely isn't just the Kuro, that's why I posted this, it's all newer Plasmas).