Plasma lost, OLED won

In June 2007 this blog ran a short explainer called "Entendiendo lo que es TFT, LCD, Plasma y OLED". It was credited to the tech site Xataka, it was only a few hundred words long, and it went on to collect more links than any other technical page here. The questions it answered were the ones people asked in electronics stores that year, when flat screens were pushing out the CRT. Here is how each part of it has held up.

TFT was never a kind of screen

The post's first point was its sharpest. TFT stands for thin-film transistor: a tiny switch behind each pixel, not a way of making light. A "TFT monitor" in 2007 was almost always a TFT LCD. That distinction has outlived the panels it was written about. The OLED screen in a current phone is driven by a TFT backplane as well, which is what the "active matrix" in AMOLED refers to.

LCD won on price, then fixed its blacks

The explainer praised LCD for being thin and frugal with power, and that is how it won the decade. It is still the most common panel in monitors, laptops and cheaper televisions. The part that changed is the light behind it. Fluorescent tubes gave way to LEDs, and better sets now use thousands of small LEDs in separately dimmed zones, which gets an LCD much closer to the deep black it always struggled with.

Plasma had the better picture and lost anyway

In 2007 plasma had the contrast and viewing angles the post credited it with. It also cost more, weighed more and ran warm. Panasonic, its last big champion, ended plasma production in 2014, and Samsung and LG left the format the same year. The technology that won on picture lost on cost.

OLED outgrew its short life

The post's warning about OLED lifetime was fair for its time, when the organic materials (blue in particular) wore out quickly. OLED is now standard in phones and watches and common in high-end televisions. Wear hasn't disappeared, but panels manage it with pixel shifting and refresh cycles that limit burn-in. The advantage the post singled out, no backlight, turned out to be the important one: a pixel that is off is truly black and draws almost nothing.

The question it taught

Read today, the explainer's value is the habit it encouraged: ignore the acronym on the box and ask how the panel makes light. Shoppers now face mini-LED, QD-OLED and micro-LED, and the same question sorts them faster than any brand name does. The original post is still at its address, in Spanish, under Technology.