Heat Generation: Panasonic TC-P50ST50 vs Samsung PN51E6500 vs Sony KDL55HX850

Watts are watts, that is if a device uses 200 watts it will produce twice as much heat as another device that takes 100 watts. What I don't remember about Plasma TVs is if the wattage varies from the screen brightness. LCD(never had a LED TV) varies greatly with different screen settings and overall scene brightness. My LCD can take more than twice as much power if the scene is white verses black, contrast or backlight settings also greatly change wattage use. That said when I first got a larger HDTV I tried a Panasonic plasma. The TV was in a 12x18" room with just adequate cooling. After several hours of use the room went over 80 degrees and was just unbearable. I returned the Plasma and got a Sony LCD(actually 4" larger) and while it did raise the room temperature a few degrees it was nothing like the Panasonic Plasma.
Maybe if you had a large room or an excess of cooling or even if your TV was in the basement a plasma would be fine but not in my case and it sounds like you may be in the same boat.
If plasma TVs took a constant wattage regardless of scene brightness that might help explain why they generate more heat than a LCD, even though my TV may take 250 watts at times most of the time it's ~100 watts which doesn't seem to heat up the room too much.

Hey Capt,
Did you get the HX850? I'm still torn between the ST50 and the same Panasonic. My main points of contention are cheaper price for the Panasonic, but the burn-in etc. I watch a lot of TV, channels with logos.

Cool, thanks for your feedback! I'm leaning towards the Panasonic. I don't see the HX850 going down seeing as it went UP $200 from last week to this week. Paul's TV has the ST50 for 1200, and I was planning on hiring them to wall mount it for me so that's probably the route I'll go.

This should be moved to either the Plasma sub-forum or the Flat Panel technology sub-forum.

1. Plasmas are space heaters, more so than CCFL back-lit LCD panels, Samsung are more so than Panasonic overall, but there are exceptions,
2. It's a LCD LED back-lite TV, not a "LED" TV, which for consumers, there is no such thing,
3. Like CRTs setting of the backlight or in your case the brightness of the panel does affect current consumption, hence the difference in current consumption of these reviews/tests,
4. The advantages of LCD's that are LED edge lit is a thin bezel and panel, cheaper to produce and lower power consumption. The downside is poor brightness uniformity across the screen (flashlighting). Full array LED backlighted LCDs pretty much solve the uniformity issue, but power consumption goes up approaching plasma levels. They are more expensive also.

Samsung had most of that solved with their non CCFL driven DLP's but dropped them in 2009.
Edited by videobruce - 12/4/12 at 4:32am