so i'm going from best buy to circuit city to sears looking at this tv and comparing it to panasonic's 50in plasma. if i had to buy tomorrow, it'd be 720, but i'll be waiting, so either i'll have more cash or they'll be cheaper and i'd like to get the pz800u.

anyhow, i'm interested in the led dlp because of course it's huge. the problem is that at best buy, the set looked pretty good, nice and sharp, not as bright as the plasma, but the viewing angles were alright, and the set is huge.

i went to circuit city and they looked terrible. they were sitting by themselves away from the flat panels, and they weren'tgetting the same feed as the panels. also the thing was way too high, and it was screwing with the viewing angle.

at sears, i got to see the 50px80 next to the samsung 61. the picture looked 5 times brighter (clearer) more crisp, and way better viewing angle.

my question is, how likely is it that the 61 just looks bad because of showroom setting? and how much more likely is it that the plasma is the right tv for me?

Showroom tvs are adjusted differently from store to store. They are fed different feeds, sometimes even sd instead of hd. They are displayed at different angles and places. All this is due to either they are trying to sell one item over another due to manufacturer incentives at the moment, higher profit margins on certain sets, or they don't know how to set up a particular tv correctly.

Read the reviews of owners here and you'll get a much better idea of the good and bad points of your possible choices.

My GF and I saw the EXACT same thing recently when shopping TVs for my parents.

Abt and Tweeter had great HD feeds and the sets looked really really nice. A Magnolia rep I have dealt with in the past was nice enough to drag a 67A750 into the dedicated room and show us the Blu-Ray demo disc through a Denon player and it looked AMAZING. (I will also go on record as saying I couldn't stand DLP prior to this because I see silk screen effect on almost every RPTV set I have ever looked at from closer than 9 or 10 feet away)

I also saw the set at a Circuit City and another Best Buy and it looked just meh. No real silk screen but it was by no means good either.

Like the above poster said, settings, placement, source material and lighting all vary from place to place.

All that said, my parents now have the 67A750 and it looks incredible with HDTV and Blu-ray. It looks great with their Oppo DVD player. It even looks passable with SD material. They watch TV in a fairly bright room 75% of the time as well.

I'm even considering one as a stop gap for our gameroom until we get a projector next year.


I will say that the viewing angle is not great. It's no problem for any of the scenarios I have in my home nor my parents, but I could see it effecting people sitting well off center. We found the 650 series to have a better off angle picture.

If I based my decision on how the picture looked in the store, I would have never bought my Sammy LED DLP. I trust the reviews of hundred of people both here and on Amazon. Many people speculate they almost try to make these look bad in stores so they can sell other sets with higher profit margins.

You saw that the set can have amazing PQ with a good source and some minor calibration. Trust me, don't believe what you see in stores.