I'm thinking of getting a Samsung 71 series LCD or Sony XBR4. One thing that is holding me back is in a dark room when watching anything that doesn't fill the screen, the black bars look faded and less than black. Is there a comparable plasma that has true black black bars? THANX!

I'm thinking of getting a Samsung 71 series LCD or Sony XBR4. One thing that is holding me back is in a dark room when watching anything that doesn't fill the screen, the black bars look faded and less than black. Is there a comparable plasma that has true black black bars? THANX!

You are gonna get a whole lot of kuro answers followed by sammy and panny. If you choose lcd, the 71 is blacker than the xbr, I owned them both.

So is it true in general LCD TVs are not able to produce true black bars where (in general) Plasmas are? THANX!

So is it true in general LCD TVs are not able to produce true black bars where (in general) Plasmas are? THANX!

Neither LCDs or Plasmas can produce perfect blacks. Even CRT displays produce some unwanted light. The best displays for quality blacks are the new Pioneer Kuro plasmas. The Samsung 81F series LCD also produces incredible blacks, however, they achieve this by local dimming of the LED backlights.

Yes and no. Some top end LCDs like Samsung 81 (and maybe 71) series can use tricks to turn off backlite section by section to achive deep blacks. But in general, plasmas has the better blacks, not only in the deep blacks but also showing black details in a dark scene where the above mentioned trick does not work.

Ive always been disgusted with black levels on non-crt's especially in a dark room, However I recently purchased a Kuro 5080HD and I was surprised with its black level performance even with it sitting next to my Sony XBR960 CRT. In fact the Kuro was showing more shadow details than the CRT which made me realise it needed adjustment this whole time. I posted some pics of my 5080 here: Link (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=12644373&postcount=652)