A couple of weeks ago I bought a Samsung 32" LCD tv from best buy because it was the best looking tv in the store and I figured LCD had reached maturity by now. It cost around $2300. It looked like crap when I brought it home and after a week of fiddling with all the settings I couldn't get it to look right. It was ok with decent signals, i.e. audioquest yiq-1 component video from dvd, but analog signals looked even worse than the 20 yr old rca crt. It also had basically no extra features (pip, filter etc). This along with the fact that viewing non-widescreen programs was even smaller than the 27" rca s-video monitor made me return it a week later.
I went back to best buy to pick up a new tv to try but nothing interesting was available, so I went to circuit city where they had a good labor day sale and a much better selection and display. I chose a Hitachi 42" plasma model 42HDS52 which so far is the best looking tv I have seen to date ($2960). They had several DLPs and LCDs, but the plasmas looked better than any others by far. Among them, I think the HDS52 looked the best - the panasonic was a close second. The DLPs looked grey and unsaturated in color by comparison. I am so far very pleased with the results, and the extra bonus features of having PIP and a built in digital tuner is very cool. I now get HD channels as well as about 40 digital channels I never even new I was getting, and the HD channels look better than anything I have seen. My only hesitation now is that this tv only has 1024x1024 resolution whereas full hd is 1920x1080, so I am losing about half of the information in 1080i. There aren't any plasmas available that do the full resolution yet (at least under $20k), and I'm just hoping it won't happen for a few more years so I can keep this one for a while. I have two more weeks to decide, but I don't know if I can go back anymore!