If you are actually interested in educating yourself it makes a thoroughly fascinating read.

I can't be bothered

Plasmas only start from a 42" screen so what the strawberry float is he on about

What's two inches between friends?

Not much, but they guy clearly doesnt know what he is talking about

I'm disappointed. I was hoping for Kenneth Williams.

I'm disappointed. I was hoping for Kenneth Williams.

Plasmas only start from a 42" screen so what the strawberry float is he on about

B1) What is Chroma Subsampling?

Wikipedia explains chroma subsampling very well, so I’ll defer you to there: link.

In summary… Chroma subsampling is a process where color information (a.k.a., chrominance or chroma) is sacrificed in order to reduce bandwidth. Why sacrifice color information? It’s because of the limitations of our eyes. The human eye has poor color acuity for detecting color details -- especially on a moving object.

Chroma subsampling sounds like an awful idea, but think it in terms of individual pixels (which is the level where subsampling works its magic). Let’s say you have a column of bright-red pixels and another adjacent column of dark-red pixels. With subsampling, you’ll end up with two columns of bright-red pixels instead. Unless you sit 1 cm away from your TV and have the eyes of a hawk, it’s highly unlikely you can detect the difference. Compound the fact that typical video footage is a series of different images being displayed at a rate of 24/30/60 fps, subsampling becomes imperceptible to the human eye.

B2) What does “4:4:4” (or 4:2:2 or 4:2:0, etc) mean?

Again, Wikipedia explains this very well with illustrative examples: link. For more technical descriptions, check out these pages: link1, link2, link3.

For you audio-visual learners, this youtube video explains the nomenclature very well too: link.

To sum it up, 4:4:4 means no subsampling is used at all -- so your image is displayed in its purest form. Anything less than 4:4:4 means original color information is lost.

I'm pretty sure I have a 37" Panny Plasma.

It's pretty retarded to use that as a PC monitor. For it to be usable you'd have to sit way back, and you may as well have just used a smaller and higher res PC screen.

Depends on how far away you WANT to sit from the monitor.

I sit far enough away from mine that I could probably be doing with a bigger screen.

Panasonic stopped making them years ago. I think they said a Full HD 37" plasma screen would cost more to make than a 42" (or even more expensive) that it just wasn't cost effective. Real shame, I'd love a Full HD 37" plasma screen.