Even though prices have plummeted in the past few years, plasma HDTVs are still relatively expensive when compared with most other types of HDTVs. In fact, inch per inch, only LCD HDTVs cost as much or more than plasmas. So many folks who are taken with the great picture and sleek profile of plasmas look for a way to get one without breaking the bank.
One interesting approach is to skip over the "consumer" plasmas found in traditional consumer electronics retailers and to instead look at a commercial plasma. These are the plasmas you see in hotel lobbies, at airport flight status displays, and by the hundreds on trade-show floors.
There's often very little substantive difference between a consumer and a commercial plasma display, at least in terms of the features that influence your picture quality. In fact, under their surfaces, most commercial plasmas are identical to their consumer cousins, with only styling and feature differences.
So what are those feature differences? The following list gives you details:
- Most commercial plasmas don't have a TV tuner (not even an NTSC tuner for standard-definition broadcasts). You need to use an external TV tuner, cable box, or satellite box to receive standard- or high-definition TV broadcasts on these models.
- The manufacturer assumes that you'll mount the commercial plasmas on a wall, a ceiling, or even an airport luggage carousel. There likely won't be any kind of a basic stand in the box for setting up your plasma on a piece of furniture.
- Many commercial plasmas are designed to connect to a wider variety of source devices than their consumer cousins. For example, Panasonic - which is widely known for its commercial plasmas - offers a wide variety of boards for its plasma's multifunction slots. This gives you a great amount of flexibility in what you use to "feed" your plasma, from RGB connectors for home-theater/Media Center PC connections to HDMI and way beyond! Panasonic even offers a built-in PC that slots into one of these modules.
The best part about these commercial plasmas? They're typically 10 to 20 percent cheaper than the consumer variants of the same plasma panels. If you don't mind a bit of extra work installing input boards (it's a simple process, much like adding memory or other components to a PC) and you don't need a built-in tuner, you might be very happy getting all industrial and going commercial. Check out online vendors like Visual Apex ( Visual Apex.com) for great deals on these plasmas.
