HDTV suggestions

[Jeff Rodriguez]

I forgot to mention one of the most important things. Trust your own eye.
Sony's may have amazing color and the Samsungs may have a contrast ratio through the roof but if they look the same as a Visio or LG or NoName brand to you, consider it.
You're going to be the one watching it the most. Trust your eye.
Also, bring a DVD with you to the store when you go looking and ask if they can play it (no offensive material). The signal that stores run to every TV in the place is not always the best quality. Use your own signal to judge.

[MrForbes]

Yeah, the wide screen TVs generally let you select the way you want to view--either "normal" (with bands at the sides when viewing 4:3 material), "full" which is how widescreen video should be, or "zoom" also called "fill" which crops the top and bottom of a 4:3 show to fit the full width of the wide screen, or "wide zoom" or "wide fill" which stretches out the edges of the 4:3 show to fill out the whole width of the screen.

I generally watch 4:3 stuff in the zoom mode.

Also, we have a couple digital TV tuners that do SDTV, not HDTV, and they also have a zoom feature, so you can select how the display looks. Typical choices are "set by program", "letterbox", "cropped", "sqeezed". I usually set it to cropped, so the sides of the widescreen content is cut off on a 4:3 TV.

What's fun is connecting the SDTV tuner to a widescreen TV, watching content that was originally HDTV (widescreen) and figuring out how to get all the zooms set so that it shows up like it should. Works well once you get it figured out...for example, I watched the Carrier show on PBS on the widescreen in full digital clarity, although it is pretty low resolution because the only PBS transmissions we get are from an SD repeater instead of the HD transmitter (the problem with living 75 miles from a big city)

[Nawaid Ladak]

Phillups and Magnovox are giving up their naming rights, their pulling out of the US TV market, so some of their TV's will go on clousout later this summer

Sony TV's are expected to get a price cut sometime in June...

If Best buy comes out with their HD Advantage deal, you can get a 42" 1080p tv for as low as $400, as long as your willing to do a bit of work for it.....(i did this....)

one of the best places to find deals on tv's and other things is www.slickdeals.net , check out the forums there, their set up A LOT like ChiefDelphi. your gonna find all sorts of deals there

personally, i have a Westinghouse 42" 1080p LCD HDTV, and it works great

hopefully my $0.02 helps you out.

[petek]

If you go the Costco/Sams route, be aware that they often are carrying older models. When I got our Sharp Aquos LC37D90U LCD last year, Costco was carrying a year-older model with fewer features. I'm quite happy with the Sharp, BTW.

You can get the Sharp LC37D64 for $1275.55 at Abes of Maine (where I got ours).