Let me share my opinion about plasma and LCD TV, and also my observations on the picture of full HD LCD TV and Panasonic Plasma. Hopefully, our opinion here shall provide partial answers to Gboy29's concern.
Generally, people choose Plasma over LCD because of its picture quality: Plasma TV delivers richer and natural color; it displays faithful black that provides better contrast; it also handles efficiently the fast-moving images . Plasma TV is the ideal choice for movie and sports viewing audience. If you're watching a racing car zooming around the track, or a tennis ball flying through the air, it will be crisp and clear with no blur on a Plasma TV.
The Plasma TV is available in the size bigger than 40". It is not available in the lower size TV. Consumers prefer Plasma to LCD for larger screen sizes as they are ideal for big screen viewing. They prefer LCD TVs in small screen sizes of 37 inches and below, as they are ideal for smaller living spaces and brightly lit areas.
At Sights and Sounds, we did side by side comparison on a full HD LCD TV (we use Sony KLV40X200), and Panasonic TH42PV70 with a Pioneer demo disc played on the Pioneer DV600 dvd player that ran thru HDMI splitter. Upscaling both TVs to 1080p, our finding was the TH42PV70 has better picture quality. Panasonic has vibrant but natural color than LCD TV (probably because of its 29 billion colors). It produces better black, especially on night scene movie. It has good contrast that differentiate black to white. Its deep blacks provide excellent shadow detail, while brilliant whites allow this Plasma TV to render bright scenes with vivid realism. By the way, LCD TV's tend to have difficulty going fully "black" because of backlight difficulty to shine through LCD panel.
Although LCD TVs usually show object with jagged appearance when presented with fast motion picture, like Fast and the Furious movie. the Sony KLV40X200 doesn't show any blur despite of its susceptible to delay.
We also played both TVs at 1080p with Pioneer bluray BDPLX70. The result was that both TVs that are capable of accepting a 1080p source shows virtually identical in details. The differences in picture sharpness are minor and hard to identify. It is difficult for us to see the picture differences presented at a Full HD TV and one with lower native resolution. The differences might become somewhat apparent if you sit close to the screen.
In some reviews, Full HD TV is claimed to look better with the HD broadcast than with the software presentation. Until we have HD broadcast, we believe we cannot justify this issue here.
Our conclusion is Panasonic TH42PV70 is more worthwhile to own than to have a Full HD TV which can only provide very minor differences in picture presentation.
By the way, we wish to enlighten the public of this observation: We often see LCD TVs look very good in the showroom. That's because the LCD TV was deliberately set by the manufacturer for it to look bright and good on the showroom floor. However, when you bring home the set, you soon discover that its bright picture quality is not tolerable to your viewing. Chances are you will tone-down the brightness, and soon you will see that the LCD TV won't look as good as plasma TV anymore.
For more on-site comparison of TVs, we invite readers to visit our shop at Shangri-La Plaza.
