Plate Armor Too Advanced for Middle Earth?

[bropous]

I was reading an article on another site about FotR, and someone made an interesting point. They thought that using plate armor in middle earth was out of place. The point was that plate armor reflects more of a middle ages feel to armor while tolkien only spoke of chaim mail in the books, and that middle earth was more dark ages based. What do you think about this objection?

For me, I had always visualized all of the warrior characters in chain mail, except, for some reason, Imrahil of Dol Amroth, whom I visualized in a combo of chain mail and plate pieces. Was there any mention of other armor varieties in the book?