All the various technologies have come a long way in recent years. I've seen the latest generation of Fujitsu plasmas, and they look pretty good. Motion artifacs and mosquito noise are much less obvious than prior generations. But, I personally like a big image, and when you sit within 6-7' of a plasma, you can see its pixel structure. None of the plasmas I've looked at have cured the over-emphasis of green (actually yellow green) that gives grass an almost flourescent look. I also don't like having to view everything in fat mode to avoid burn-in problems.
I have a single-chip DLP RPTV. While I see the rainbows, they don't bother me that much. While the fill factor is much higher than plasmas, the picture is not as smooth as I would like it to be. Also, even when calibrated many sets have odd, unnatural colors and the gray scale does not seem to go smoothly from black to white (same problem with plasmas). At CEDIA, I saw InFocus' 7" deep, hang-on-the-wall 60" DLP. Not a bad picture -- no big problems with focus at the edge that I had expected to see. I understand InFocus is also making the same set for RCA.
I heard that Sharp is making a 45" LCD panel. That is promising. At smaller sizes, I like the picture on Sharps and Toshibas. Colors are quite nice with LCDs and the picture is smooth. While black level has improved recently, LCDs have a long way to go when it comes to motion artifacts -- they just respond to slowly to fast changing images. On a big, 45" screen, that could be a real problem.
Finally, I come to my next set. I saw Sony's version of a LCOS RPTV which uses three 1920x1080 chips (same SXRD chip as in the $30,000 Qualia front projector). This is the best RPTV picture I've ever seen, by a substantial margin. While the Sony demo at CEDIA utilized some dark scenes (Spiderman trailer), it was not easy to tell whether the black level and contrast really was as good as it looked, or whether they monkeyed with the gamma curve and some detail in the shadows were lost. Sony says the set will sell for $10,000 -- about the same as a premium large screen plasma.
