From the 90’s History – The Plasma TV and Me

Plasma TV was a project I started in Late 1987- this is a story dated 1997 – The Worlds First FlatScreen Plasma TV’s
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/1997/04/14/story8.html

The flat panel screens — 42 inches high but just four inches thick — are being made by privately-held QFTV.
Peter Marcus, QFTV’s founder and Chairman, plans to make 5,700 sets this year, the High definition TV is supposed to offer viewers a flicker-free, high-resolution image. By 2000, the most optimistic industry estimates are for 4 million HDTVs to be produced worldwide, compared to 100 million standard television sets.. Instead of focusing on consumers, QFTV’s early flat screen monitors were used by Avon cosmetics in its corporate suite at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Intel had QFTV digital video monitors at the 1996 Comdex show, together with Starbucks Store of The Future. Miramax Pictures used QFTV’s huge tube at the recent Academy Awards. Affluent videophiles are just 10 percent of QFTV’s target audience. Marcus scored a coup late last year by getting Hammacher Schlemmer, the well known Chicago-based retailer, to include the QFTV set in its catalog February 1997. Story from San Francisco Business Times.

As an update:

The principle is simple: instead of using a beam of electrons to create the lines on a TV screen, the plasma screen uses what are in effect tiny quick-acting fluorescent light cells to form a picture. In a modern color plasma displays each pixel has three of these fluorescent lights, each one in a different primary color, and fires them intelligently to create the desired color. (LCD TVs use individual LCD shutters in each pixel to create a similar effect.)

But what is plasma? Essentially it is an electrically conductive gas that contains free-flowing ions (positively charged) and electrons (negatively charged). If you introduce more electrons by applying a voltage through the gas then they will begin to collide with atoms, knocking off electrons and turning them into ions. Then negatively charged particles will start to move towards the positively charged area, and vice versa. This causes the atomic equivalent of a motorway pile up, with particles smashing into each other and the xenon and neon gases used in plasma screens releasing photons of light. Most of this light is ultraviolet light which is invisible, but this is turned into visible light by painting the tiny cells with phosphoric material.

The result is that plasma displays are far shallower than older TVs, you can mount them on a wall and conveniently hide them behind a well-placed curtain. They can also be scaled up by adding more pixels and enough computing firepower to run them. The biggest plasma TV I found was 152 inches, around 3 metres long, and will set you back over $600,000.