Every pinball before incorporated new technology of the day. Like if you look at a really old gas pump it's like an 80's machine. It only makes sense that new machines would incorporate lcd's. People buy ipads, right. Or, call it the gas pump technology. EM, SS, LCD.

BUT....in a lot of ways pinball 2000 was a mistake. It will be really interesting to see if LCD can be pulled off. Taking it out of the playfield and onto the back box is a huge step forward.

New tech has to go hand in hand with good design.

Does anyone anticipate Stern going LCD?

The technology has potential to improve according to the LCD. But, making games immersive is key. Already noted on the thread, part of pinball is having each machine in unique variation, set up a certain way, so it's doubtful that internet scoring is the future of pinball. As noted above, there are too many variables, and reducing them to make scoring fair would make pinball like a video game. And people are spending thousands on pinball machines, not video games. No one in the pinball market is looking for the game to turn into a video game. When it does...it often seems dated, like DMD games seem dated on Johnny Mnemonic and others. Like the best virtual emulation seems dated.

What the LCD does offer is a way to improve the playing experience of traditional pinball. Not in a gimmicky way, like a touchscreen near the flippers. What a LCD could do is expand game time and provide a platform for programming. Now you have DMD animations that are short and repetitive. Games are typically fairly long. Maybe having such a repetitive set of animations isn't the future of pinball, where home use is very important to the American market. If a machine is used for home use, it would be more immersive, to the point where a game could be made to last for hours, or even days. LCD technology, combined with more sophisticated programming, could make that a reality. (Last for days, as in, shoot the ball into a ball lock, or auto-save, leave the machine in sleep mode, come back and resume the game...hours or days later.) Have much longer sets of video or animation, that could trigger to the tune of GBs worth of data. Videos that play according to the theme in a unique manner, according to the duration of play. An LCD screen would make pinball more sophisticated, while operating in the traditional backglass manner. Games could choose between tournament, coin-op, and home use modes, all with different characteristics. This could be done with an LCD as the driving force of choice making, saving, and menu items on the pinball. Not as a game-within-a-game. Pinball machines are discrete units that favor the sophistication of chance over sprites and levels. Video games are solved and pinball machines are not. The LCD will provide a menu, a backdrop, and a platform to provide unique and novel video clips as a reward, and a way for much more complicated games and programming decisions to be enacted. But, the LCD has to stay in the background, and not overtake the game itself.