I have the second to last generation Panasonic plasmas. 42" 1080p display. At first the picture was amazing but over time it degraded slightly with what looks like subtle noise affecting the entire display. Solid colors have a faint shimmer of noise in them. As if white noise was blended with everything.
I still use it as a bedroom TV. I can barely lift it myself and it claims to use 450watts of power. It's certainly a lot. It's notably warm near it and will heat my room if I don't open the door.
Still the picture quality is very good at a distance. Only oled or micro led displays look better.
This could be that you just noticed it? Panasonic plasma cells brightness is controlled by PWM off a 600 Hz carrier (it's even proudly advertised as "600 Hz!" on the TV box and stickers). While the number is quite big and stands out nicely against "240 Hz" advertised as refresh rate for the competing LCD TVs, it did not provide many different brightness levels per pixel (keep in mind that it's divided by 60 Hz or higher frame refresh) so those TVs were running temporal stochastic dithering to create more levels. If you looked closely at a new plasma TV screen it was very noisy with random pixels firing up at high frequency.
The level of noise went up dramatically after the first year. I read that this is part of the panel aging. It hasn't gotten worse since then. My two biggest gripes are high brightness areas don't work on large portions of the screen. A windows file browser is basically unusable.
The heat is probably what will eventually get me to replace it.
The heat! Many plasma displays had a faint heat you would feel on your face if you were near that I found uncomfortable. I am not sure if others felt the same.
I had a year of sickness, or so, back in the day. I decided I was gonna blow as much money as I could on the "best" TV setup. I bought a 42" plasma TV, and I sat it on the floor in my living room, in front of a window.
You could see the heat-haze above the screen, the air shimmering in front of the window, after it had been on for a while.
Lovely display, far too expensive, and far far too heavy, but for the five+ years I kept it I think I got my money's worth.
I had a Zenith 42" plasma (maybe Zenith Z42PX2D?) for about 10 years before the screen became insanely noisy and LG OLEDs hit the market. Really an amazing display though, at "tv distance" (6 to 8ft) the 852x480 resolution was not at all noticeable as "low resolution".
What I actually found was dog-shit quality video looked AMAZING on it, as did downsampled high-res video -- I had a media center pc hooked up via DVI, and off it went.
I replaced it with a 1080p 55" OLED in 2014 or 15 when it became unwatchable, and it's been incredible as well aside from very rare, short instances of judder.. As per my Zenith experience above, I figured lower-res (not 4k) would be better in the long run.
Curious to see how long it lasts, but it's still very bright and very good almost a decade later, no burn-in, no dead pixels, and it's on constantly.
I've still got a 42 inch GT60 plasma and while it certainly runs hot it's pulling about 140W on average so it's no space heater.
It's become a bit more noisy, but not in a way that impacts viewing for me. After a while you don't see it anymore just like film grain...
