How about a 42" Panasonic 1080P Viera PZ77 Plasma for about $1499 on Boxing Day? Currently, London Drugs has them for $1599. But there's a rumour that it'll be $1499 at Sears on Boxing Day. FS and BB prices are much higher ($1899-$1999).
http://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/s...light=th42pz77
APC Mag:
http://apcmag.com/6983/the_case_for_plasma_hdtvs
Cached version:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:...lnk&cd=1&gl=ca
RE: Your Canucks Requirement:
"Plasmas do sport better
The response times of the plasma screens that we examined (the time it takes for a pixel to switch on and off and on again) was around 4ms. While it’s not as fast as the response times of CRT TVs (once measured by Tom’s Hardware as .8 ms) it’s still faster than LCD screens. The fastest LCDs have response times of around 6ms while most are now around the 8ms mark. The difference in reponse time translates to more visible motion blur on the LCD TVs. In moments of fast action, the LCD TVs don’t keep up as well as plasmas and fuzziness is evident around some of the play."
"We watched Ten’s AFL HD broadcasts (1920 x 1080i broadcast format) on both plasmas and LCDs, and when the action on the field became fast paced, there was visible blurring in parts of the LCD pictures. We don’t want to overstate the problem, since the higher resolution of an HDTV regardless of whether it’s a plasma or LCD makes the sporting experience much more immersive than on an old SD set, but it can be annoying to see the kind of blurring in fast paced scenes that you’d never see on a CRT TV. For the worst sporting experience, watch an SD broadcast like the rugby league on an HDTV. The upscaling of the SD picture to fit the HDTV screen, plus some motion blur, makes the experience a horror show. "
RE: Bang For the Buck:
"You get more TV for the money"
"Most plasmas in retail outlets range in size between 42in and 50in and tend to cost less than equivalent sized LCD TVs."
"You can get a 50inch Panasonic (127cm) 1366x768 plasma with an integrated TV tuner (Viera TH-50PX70A) – or a 50in 1366x768 LG plasma with integrated tuner (50PC1D) for around $3,000-$3,500. In the tests, a Panasonic 50in plasma panel was one of the best TVs we looked at. Any LCD TV at around the same size will cost roughly double. For example, the 52in Sony Bravia (KDL52X2000) retails for around $9,000. "
RE: Power Consumption:
"Plasmas
don’t consume more power than LCDs"
"In a direct comparison between two similarly sized TVs, the LG 42 inch plasma (42PC1DG-AA), used 0.216 kilowatts per hour, vs the 0.228 kilowatts of the LG 42 inch LCD — (42LC7D-AB). "
RE: Lifespan:
"Plasma's lifespan is now long enough not to matter."
"At 40,000 hours, that’s 20 years of watching TV five hours a day. It’s unlikely you’ll still have the same TV set 20 years from now regardless of how good the picture is."
RE: Burn-In:
"Plasma's propensity for burn-in is overblown."
"We even left a fixed image on a Panasonic plasma for about eight hours (sorry Panasonic!) to see whether we could detect a faint burn or ghost, but no such luck. A Panasonic engineer who was not aware of our experiment then told us it would take about four days or more for a static image to burn its ghost onto a modern plasma screen."
"It’s highly unlikely that any plasma would be stuck on the same image four days in a row."
Consumer Reports rated the 50" Panasonic Plasma PZ700 (an older model) as having the best picture for a flat panel TV ever tested:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/e...sma-tvs-ov.htm
"The Panasonic TH-50PZ700U 1080p plasma TV has the best picture quality of any flat-panel TV we've tested, with very fine detail, rich colors and deep blacks."