theyarecomingforyou wrote on Feb 8, 2012, 21:04:
Plasmas have pretty poor image quality (that's why they're cheaper; most aren't even true 1080p resolution) - noticeably inferior to LED HDTVs.
You're talking about cheap plasmas and cheap plasmas are still usually above the quality of cheap LCDs. There is no such thing as LED HDTVs, that's industry marketing. There are LCD HDTVs that use LED backlighting. Most are crappy edge lit TVs, they don't even do local dimming which means they could never, ever achieve the detail levels you would see in a plasma or CRT. LCDs also have terrible grey level conversions compared to CRT or plasmas.
Showrooms are purposely staged to sell you specific profit margin items and LCDs always have their settings dialed to the maximum to assist with this. In fact most TVs now come with a store setting which purposely misrepresents their intended picture settings. If you're going to judge a plasma by how you saw some crappy 720p Samsung plasma then you should also judge LCDs by the shitty Bestbuy house brands.
There are other considerations than picture quality alone and LCDs have many positive features that I'm not mentioning here. If someone wants a TV with the best picture though then the past several years running that's been a plasma model (Pioneer Kuro, Panasonic GT/VT models). You have to go to very high end LCD models to see the rough equivalent and most usually can't do the black levels of a plasma nor render motion without a lot of obvious panel processing.
OLED shows a lot of promise and seems to be a fantastic technology bridge between LCD, Plasma and CRT but the manufacturing costs are still in the stratosphere and will be quite some time. I'm really looking forward to affordable ones but I think it's going to be another 3-5 years.