A comparative study of a single sustaining driver (SSD) with single- and dual-energy recovery paths for plasma display panels (PDPs) is shown in this paper. The cost of PDPs is still very high and half of the cost includes the driving circuit. Therefore, it is important to have cost-effective driving waveform and the SSD to reduce the cost and size of the driving circuit. The SSD has fewer switching devices and reactive components and can be developed with single- and dual-path energy recovery circuits for charging and discharging PDPs. We shall evaluate the performance of these circuits in this paper. Since the dual-path energy recovery circuit has low power consumption, low surge current, and high performance. We shall verify these results using a 42-in high-definition panel.