In a press conference earlier today that was followed by an official written statement to shareholders, Pioneer has announced that it will restructure its display business, and by restructure, it means cease the production of plasma displays. After suffering losses totaling almost $100-million USD in the current fiscal year, and remaining unable to find third party buyers of its plasma glass to help cover production costs, Pioneer will close its own plasma factories and seek panel modules from another supplier (widely speculated to be Panasonic, but this was not identified in the official release).

This is strange because my family owns both a 50 inch plasma and a 40 inch LCD, and the plasma easily blows the lcd out of the water when it comes to picture quality. I'm amazed at the lack of plasma adoption out there.

the reason for this is cause you have a 50 inch plasma.

above 42 inch, Plasmas are generally better quality than LCDs.

However, that won't explain why there is a quality difference between 50 and the 40. How old is your 40 inch and what res does it support. it could very well just be that your LCD model is inferior to your plasma.

Plasmas are expensive to maintain.

And very easily destroyed. Watch one channel for too long and you've got the network's watermark burned into your screen.

It looks like Pioneer is aborting their plasma display unit due to financial losses and other big electronics companies will probably follow:

Long live LCD

…we have judged that maintaining the cost competitiveness of plasma display panels at projected sales volumes will be difficult going forward.

Plasmas are expensive to maintain.