I've always loved Plasma TV's, they have an awesome contrast ratio and reaction time versus LCD, 2,000,000:1 vs 8,000:1 for contrast ratio and the very best LCD monitors have 2 ms reaction time versus 1 microsecond for plasma! - typical CRT is 0.5 milliseconds. Plasma also has a wide viewing range, you can sit off to one side and still clearly see the screen, try it with LCD and it'll fade to black.

The problem is that the plasma TV's are going away, too much heat, too much power. They also flicker a little on large single color surfaces - they are actually tiny fluorescent tubes.

The new TV's are LED (actually LED backlit LCD), about 1 Million:1 contrast! Half as good as gas plasma, but WAY better than conventional LCD. They are quite expensive right now, but I saw a new Samsung, and I liked it tons more than traditional LCD.

Anyone else have an opinion or experience?

 

Here's the quick and dirty:

Plasma: Great blacks, ok white, sometimes only slight off-whites at best. Stupid fast refresh rate so great for fast sports. Newest Panasonics can do 96Hz for 24Hz content, so nice and liquid smooth. Poor energy efficiency.

LED LCD: Good blacks, awesome whites (like ****ing burn a hole in your brain bright white), getting faster but still far from the response time vs plasma so not as good for face moving sports, great energy efficiency if you don't turn up the brightness. Very easy to get colors right, hard to get contrast right (depends on set, but most sets have dynamic contrast which PUMPs the contrast scene to scene... annoying!)

CRT: King on contrast, it's straight up IMMEASURABLE. Refresh is instant... that's right instant, cause it's ANALOG! It's not very sharp, but can be, usually not though. Blown out colors, heavy saturation. Might be your thing, but not for most who are serious about TVs. Just preferences really. Not energy efficient.

That's the jist of it. If you are looking for TVs, do your homework! And always buy from a place that you can easily return the set to if there is any issue.

 

^sounds right to me

 

What the heck is a 3d TV? Lots of these hitting the market.

 

is that calibration disk still floating around?

 

I personally just don't see tons of people wanting to wear 3D Glasses everytime they want to sit and watch tv. Maybe it's a good thing as it will make people want to spend less time in front of their tv because they are getting headaches from staring through those 3D Glasses for extended periods of time and make people go out and interact with other people in the outside world again.