Quote Originally Posted by zepman1
Plasma has been cheaper for sometime, and is generally always cheaper than LCD these days. There are certainly benefits to LCD panels, but I don't know how anyone could really think LCD picture looks better than plasma. I mean if you are comparing similarly priced sets, the difference in black levels, motion resolution, and contrast isn't even that close. Other than energy savings and brightness what benefits does LCD provide?

And in most situations brightness is irrelevent because on my plasma, the brightness is set at around 50-60% when properly calibrated. On my LCD it is properly set at around 45%. The extra brightness of LCD panels is only useful if you like watching it in nuclear holocaust mode.

Colors should be calibrated to the HDTV spec and in a perfect world would be the same on all tv's. Plasma colors look better because of the superior contrast.
That's because most people watch their TVs at home, rather in flood-lit warehouse clubs. If you're used to watching a calibrated screen, which I had been for the better part of 7 years, the benefits of plasma are very apparent after adjusting the picture out of the torch mode. The newer higher end LCDs are much improved over what I saw a couple of years ago, but at the same time, the plasma performance has greatly improved as well.

Also, the approaches that LCD TVs have used to improve the contrast and motion resolution performance can also do nasty things to the picture. For example, motion interpolation (referred to as Motionflow, and other names) bumps the motion resolution up closer to plasma levels, but it also makes film images look like they were shot on a camcorder. You can switch the motion interpolation off, but that brings the motion resolution back down as well.

One irony is that the newest thin-panel plasmas have nearly doubled the maximum light output, while the strobing CCFLs used on many of the new "240 Hz" LCDs have the side effect of reducing the light output by about 50%.

Quote Originally Posted by Groundbeef
I was at my parents house this weekend. They have a Sony LCD. I had set the brightness down a bit after I visited the last time. Apparently they didn't like it, and set it to factory maximum.

I had to wear my sunglasses AND put on sunscreen. If that screen lasts another year I'll be suprised.
My in-laws have their Samsung set the same way. It's a brightly lit room, but that high brightness setting just blurs the images and I've noticed color banding on their set as well. Of course, they didn't know they weren't watching HD either until I pointed out which channels on their dish were in HD.