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Who's Ben Q and why is he in my living room?
By Sean Carruthers, posted 9/8/2003 4:55:55 PM

BenQ-Plasma For the longest time, plasma displays were only found in business settings, thanks to their exorbitant cost. Now that there's been a sharp decline in the price of plasma screens, it's becoming more common to see them in the living room. It's no real surprise that people want a plasma display as the centrepiece of their home theatre setup: the screens are extremely thin compared to tube or projection televisions; they can be mounted onto the wall; and they are very bright. What's more, they're very versatile, with connections for all the standard video sources (S-Video, composite, and component) as well as connectors for computer video outputs.

BenQ PDP-46WI plasma display
www.benq.com
Estimated price: US$4,000

When it comes to the large plasma screens, most of them seem to settle on sizes of 42 or 50 inches diagonally. The 46-inch PDP-46WI splits the difference while maintaining the 16:9 widescreen ratio, meaning it's still a great choice for watching movies. The screen has a resolution of 852x480 pixels, so it's not quite up to the High Definition TV specification, though it can certainly translate HDTV signals to fit the screen.

The picture quality on the PDP-46WI is very good, with a very bright display, good colour reproduction, and a fantastic on-screen menu system. When you turn it on, it automatically hunts for a signal coming from any of the video inputs, but you also have the option of overriding this and selecting one manually. There are options in the menu system for adjusting the ratio of the picture (from the 16:9 widescreen ratio to the standard TV ratio of 4:3, for example), as well as selecting the type of input signal (NTSC, PAL, or SECAM, see sidebar). And although there aren't any speakers built into the display itself, audio inputs and speaker terminals are included, with 3D Audio WOW surround processing capabilities included.

The most welcome feature here is the pricing: after years of seeing plasma screens hovering between $10,000 and $20,000, the move earlier this year towards $8,000 and lower was certainly welcome. At US$4,000, this one is more likely to be closer to $6,000, if not lower, making it cheaper than ever to put a plasma screen into your living room.

By Sean Carruthers