Looking for a 50" HD TV

This is a really nice unit. I still prefer plasma. Check out the Plasma Depot www.plasmadepot.com for decent pricing. also, these places on-line will get you the better deal even for the DLP, expecially if you live in California and want to avoid the sales tax.

IMHO, the SONY 50" LCD has a better scaler than the Samsung when viewing standard definition programming. The putting greens had a "posterized" look while watching golf on a friend's brand new 50" Samsung DLP. I saw the same artifact on the demo set at Best Buys yesterday. The Sony doesn't do that.

Considering 98% of what is on TV is standard definition, the quality of the scaler is a very important consideration when watching all those SDTV shows.

Also, the SONY LCD chip has slightly higher resolution than the Samsung (768X1366 for Sony vs 720X1280 for Samsung). Considering they retail for the same price it comes down to personal preference.

I am also in the market for a set this size and am very disappointed with the quality of conventional "tube" RPTVs. The claimed 1080 horizontal television lines has to be a line doubled 540 raster scans. HDNET looks "soft" on all these sets regardless of manufacturer. The goosebumps you get from watching HD material on a plasma or larger RPTV just isn't there.

For what it's worth, the new 4:3 SONY 40" tube TV KILLED every 16:9 RPTV I've seen with HD material. Too bad you have to deal with those pesky black bars... Good luck.

The best IMHO is the Pioneer Elite 50' plasma screen. Beautiful in every sense. It cost over $10k though.
Vik

Just want to join in the action. I really like LCD Rear Projectors but their color of black is terrible. The DLP Rear Projectors are much better than LCD in my opinion. But I would take a Plasma any day over anything else because of its picture and viewing angle. The only thing holding me back is the price. My favorite Plasma for now is the Pioneer Elite which the price has drop so much.
I work for an audio/video store and our prices for Pioneer Elite Plasma are much less than $10,000.

Bill from www.yawaonline.com

You may already be aware, but the AVS Forum site is a great place to get educated about video. There is a section of the forum for RPTV's (CRT and DLP) here and another for plasma and LCD devices here .

50" are easy to checkout, but Smaller Models are almost non existent.

What really gets me is that places are selling regular analog units and pretending that you are getting a great deal when in reality they are selling stuff that is relatively worth nothing in relation to what the market is moving torwards.

I always liked Mitsubishi,but Sony might be taking the lead there.

Good luck!

Pick up the present issue of The Prefect Vision for their comments on the rise of LCD and performance versus plasmas.

BTW- It is a very postive step foward for LCDs.

Geeze Willobandb...I just spent thirty minutes lurking on the A/V forum. Some guy posted..."CRTs aren't capable of displaying the 1440 lines for a 720P* source..." What??? I lost count of the number of posts where people don't know the difference between vertical and horizontal resolution. Thanks for the link but I'm afraid there's a lot of mis-information being dispensed on that site.

*720P has is made up of 720 horizontal scan lines (vertical resolution), not 1440. Assuming the pixels are symmetrical (round or square), a 16X9 display would yield horizontal resolution of 1280 lines.

It's no coincidence that 720X1280 is the native resolution of most HD plasma's, DLPs and LCDs. Now if we only knew what the real resolution is with 7" CRTs... or should I ask, can a 7" CRT display a 4 mil. (.004") spot???