Quote:
Originally posted by TerryBPP
I think its the next Tornado. Some people feel it in the seat of there pants and it's all in there head.
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I disagree. There is a night and day difference between HD and "regular" tv broadcast.
For the most part, there are 3 types of HD tv's. Traditional (crt), LCD, and Plasma. CRT's will be the biggest, but they still provide the best bang. If you're in for certain size, they mostly top out at 34". Sony's top of the line is universally recognized as the standard for North America.
http://www.crutchfield.com/S-TPzGeku8x5K/cgi-bin/ProdView.asp?wm=fp&I=158KD34XBR&g=154450
There is a Panasonic that's probably even better than the Sony, but the North American market only got the 32" model, vs rest of the world's 34"
Either way, by some standards, 34" is considered quite small today. If you want bigger it will cost more, although the quality may be close, but probably will not improve over the crt image.
LCD tvs are bigger, almost any size that you need, but do your research since some had problems. Sony's LCD tvs had bulb problems, relating to the power source for the bulb. Plenty of warranty fixes, but you probably don't want to deal with that w/in 6mos of purchasing anything that expensive. LCD's are thicker than Plasma tv's and generally they can't hang on the wall, if you're into that. They provide about 96% picture quality of a pure plasma HD tv, at half the price.
Plasmas are the thin sets, that have great performance (it still varies model-to-model, compare to see what type of picture you like more) but the price is really up there. It's tough to go for it unless you really have plenty to spend, b/c in a year or two those sets will be for 1/2 price.
Here's a brief description of the issues w/ some tv's. It's a bit like cars where you can't totally trust a first model of anything to be quite perfect. That's where the extended warranty/option plan will save your butt if you buy from one of the big chains etc. Sure, the manufacturer has its own warranty, but good luck packing the behemoth and shipping it after bringing it to the post office, UPS etc.
http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/2/15673.html
Whatever model you go for, I'd do a search on it on the "ecoustics bbs" site. They really alert you to any problems that may arise.
I agree w/ the comment above about types of connections. Most of the new sets will probably have them anyway, but you want to look for the scart, dvi etc types of (video) connections.
There are many choices, some very expensive, but the picture is remarkable.