The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen

This traces the invention, development, and disappearance of the plasma display. It begins with PLATO in 1960, where CRTs demanded constant high-bandwidth video and expensive local memory, prompting Donald Bitzer and Robert Willson to experiment with gas plasma pixels in the early 1960s. Key engineering breakthroughs included moving electrodes to the outside of the glass sandwich (1964) and the serendipitous discovery that a tiny amount of air produced a “memory” effect. Prototypes scaled to a 16×16 array by 1967, and commercial manufacture followed when Owens-Illinois filled panels with continuous gas and shipped the 512×512 “Digivue” in 1971. Important dates include a one-cell demo in 1962, the 16×16 array by 1967, Digivue in 1971, a 60-inch plasma in 1999, and Samsung’s 102-inch demo in 2005.

The account then explains why plasma rose and fell: plasma offered thin, rugged large-format screens, grayscale by rapid flicker, and later color, and found niches in banking, military, laptops, and large HDTVs. But DRAM and Moore’s Law eliminated the original CRT-memory problem, while plasma remained more power-hungry, hotter, dimmer, and costlier to manufacture. LCD advanced rapidly, benefited from much greater manufacturing investment and higher yields, and by the 2010s had supplanted plasma; plasma lost nearly all market share by 2013 and manufacturing essentially ceased by the decade’s end, following a standard technology S-curve in reverse.