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Originally Posted by Patrick Sun
Once you go with flatscreen technology, it's tough to go back to a RP model, even with the larger viewing area.
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Just got back from a quick perusing at Circuit City. Gotta say that I was underwhelmed by the Samsung DLP's, and left more impressed by Plasma's image quality and relative affordability.
The 61" DLP had tremendous problems with viewing angle, even in the sweet spot. At no angle was the screen uniformly bright. Straight-on, all four corners were obviously dimmer, and the bright/dark areas just moved around as you changed positions. Clearly they were attempting too large a screen for the projector.
The 50" was much better, but the sweet spot is not very big before the image became uneven. There was also LCD-like artifacting going on during motion.
LCD's were noticably brighter than Plasma (not a concern for me), but they still don't have the response times of the panels fast enough yet. Motion artifacts were very obvious, as well as what appeared to be scaling artifacts (which weren't as obvious on the Plasmas for some reason). Viewing angle seems to be a solved problem on LCD.
The Plasmas were gorgeous, gotta say. And if you don't care about 1080p, surprisingly affordable. The 50" 720p units were reliably at the $1500 price point. 1080p has a stiff $600-700 premium, which at 8 feet you'd really have to be splitting hairs to notice an improvement. I doubt I'd be able to pick them out double-blind. The image quality difference is more likely to come from whether the TV is having to rescale the image rather than the final resolution.
So now I'm leaning Plasma, which is a whole new set of compromises. A 50" 720p is comfortably in my $$$$ threshold of pain. Going up to 1080p gives me pause pricewise, although I'm concerned about future-proofing, even though the image quality is probably a non-issue. Going much larger is really painful, I'd do better to wait if I want >50", but after seeing the 50-60" range, I'd have to say that the current space likely isn't amenable to a 60" unit.
I don't have much of a brand affinity, with the slight advantage to Panasonic given I have a Viera-compatible DVD player. Any thoughts on that? Worth sticking with the Panny? Or is there an obviously better choice out there...