I get emails every single day and over thet last few days I’ve been getting a lot of questions of if 120Hz in the new LCD HDTVs is better than the 600Hz sub field included with the new plasma HDTVs currently available on the market.

Instead of giving you my uninformed opinion, I went online and found one of the best answers I could on the subject courtesy of Playstation.com: 

The only thing constructive I learned from it was that 120hz is better if you watch a lot of Blu-ray because 24hz (the BD standard) splits better into 120hz but not 60hz. Also, no device actually outputs 120hz, so you really have to be careful which TV you’d get. Because it would be upconverting your sources to 120hz, and some tvs are bad at doing things on their own.

And this:

As for 600Hz its not a 600Hz refresh Panasonic does a 600 hz subfield drive calculation…

Panasonic subdivides their plasma display panels into 10 sub-fields. Each sub-field is refreshed at a 60 Hz rate. 10 sub-fields refreshed at 60 Hz (10 x 60 = 600) produces a 600 Hz sub-field drive figure.

Is a 600 Hz sub-field drive better for fast motion?

NO. It neither helps nor hurts fast motion on a plasma display panel.

Plasma pixels switch at 1 micro-second; thousands of times faster than the fastest LCD response time. Because of this speed difference, a plasma TV operates different than a LCD TV and, therefore, does not produce the motion blur and jitter produced by a LCD display panel. Plasma TVs do NOT need 120 Hz refresh rates to compensate for these motion artifacts because they do not produce these motion artifacts.

There you have it folks.

• 600Hz Plasmas
• What Does 600 Hz Sub-field Motion Mean?
• 240Hz Vs. 600Hz – Is One Better Than The Other?
• TC-P42S1 1080p Plasma HDTV – $699 Through 1/23
• CNET Austraulia Explains 600Hz [Video]