50" Plasma, which to buy?  

YOu will want a panny or a Pioneer

i'd suggest a hitachi 55HDS69..

Ha.. HA..... :D

ditto.



Both are fantastic panels. Panny 9UK or Pio 1130HD(or PDP 5070).

stick with the name brands... trust us. Trust our instincts... and have faith in us. When I say these things I say it for good, because I care. You want good quality and good quality picture this is the way. The gate is either you choose Panny or Pio... Ok..ok.... NEC is included.

just remember.. if you want smoothest, silkiest, deepest blacks, go Panny. The sense of 3D and punchness is phenomenal. The color is usually a littler milder/less strong than the Pioneer but that can be remedied by ISF calibration or manual calibration. Pioneer has stronger and livelier colors by without much of tweaking. The brightness used to be a little better on the Pio but now with the release of Panny's 9UK the brightness is very competitive.

How do I differeniate these HDTV's? I went to Best Buy and Circuit City to try and educate myself about what they had to offer but, the store signal source was aweful.

Also, do I need to worry about significant price drops in a few months as Christmas nears? FWIW, I will be away from home all of December so I can wait if the prices are going to fall a lot.

Thanks!
Sid

I'm tickled with my Panasonic 50PX60U. Sometimes you can't tell by the store signal with any of these sets how they will look at home. Usually they will look better, in my experience. You can't go wrong with the Pioneers and the Panasonics, from what I have read. If you need a cable card and split screen then the 50PX600U is a better choice.

BB and CC will never catch up to Jap HD stations.... well I wouldn't say never but it will take a hell of long time for them to use cutting-edge stuff to get the picture *up* there.

This one.... is descent, but it's not perfect. My main HTPC(was specially setup and do provide best PQ) is broken, so I'm using the laptop right now..


http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/4012/img2326xq1.jpg

The 9uk is the commercial panel - it is a monitor (not really a TV), with a much thinner and cleaner frame. However, it does not include a tuner, table top stand, speakers or many of the input connections that come with the consumer 60u/600u. You can add connectors (eg, HDMI, etc) by purchasing input cards that fit in 3 card slots in the 9uk. The details are on the Panny web site.

I dunno... if you want to get a TV that big why not get some cool features with it, like PIP which the panasonics do not do well, (if at all.) Take better advantage of the NFL Sunday Ticket and get the hitachi 55HDT79 that has some very cool PIP options.

wendek

Check out the Samsung S5053, its gotten a lot of good reviews, including Sound and Vision mag

True PIP/POP/PAP/Split-screen requires dual NTSC/ATSC/QAM tuners, which even Dell has been supporting for years. So what's Panasonic's problem?