The main advantage of home cinema plasma screens is that a very wide screen can be produced using extremely thin materials allowng a screen to be light weight and about 4 inches thick. Since each pixel is lit individually, the image is very bright and looks good from almost every room angle making them ideal veiwing from your home cinema seats. Plasma TVs have better contrast ratios and show better blacks than an LCD TV meaning that in a dark scene images are more clearly defined. This is because in LCD technology liquid crystals are unable to shut off all the light completely due to the presence of the backlight resulting in light leakage and therefore it is impossible to get absolute black.
The lifetime of the latest generation of plasma displays is estimated at 60,000 hours of actual display time. More precisely, this is the estimated half life of the display. Half life is the point where the picture has degraded to half of its original brightness, which is considered the end of the functional life of the display. So if a plasma display is viewed an average of 2-1/2 hours a day, it will last approximately 65 years.
Plasma displays are bright, have a wide color gamut and can be produced in fairly large sizes, up to 260 cm (102 inches) diagonally. They have a very high "dark-room" contrast, creating the "perfect black" desirable for watching movies. Plasma displays use as much power per square meter as a standard television; however real life measurements of plasma power consumption find it to be much less than that normally quoted by manufacturers. Nominal measurements indicate 150 Watts for a 50" screen.
Home cinema plasma screens need multiple HDMI (high definition multimedia interface) connections because you will be connecting more than just one HD component. DVD players, cable boxes and game consoles all have HDMI capability that makes the best use of your television. Make certain that your plasma television can handle at least two HDMI connections.