Well, now i'm definitely convinced that I made the right movie in sticking with my SDTV.

Then I guess you didn't read the article.

Hey, that was gonna be my line.

The article makes a convincing case for plasma, something all intense salespeople begged me not to invest in because of various problems all relating to lifespan and such. We invested in a to-be-discontinued 720p Samsung and the television is perfectly adequate for most television viewing. The settings are toned down (and running an LCD television is expensive) but the picture never looks entirely right due to the motion smoothing mentioned in the article. I wish I had researched at least a bit before making the investment.

Oh I did read it, and it just made me glad I stayed out of the whole LCD/Plasma conflict in the first place. Like the article said, any TV you buy nowadays will make films look like reality, my Panasonic SDTV may not have the best picture quality, but at least movies look like they're supposed and don't like overly realistic like most models on display at Best Buy do. I might get a Plasma one day, but right now there's just no money or room for it.

Indeed and we must really keep reality at bay. It's already everywhere, and our only refuge is our living rooms. But for how long?

Actually that's incorrect. SDTV's can't display 24p, so really you're not getting an accurate representation of film. Plus the lower resolution doesn't do film justice at all. Not to mention that if you still use DVD, the interlacing, compression and poor color reproduction doesn't come close to film. The only benefit to sticking to SDTV is the price. Cheaper to buy and lower power consumption.

Well it looks just fine to me and like I said before, I can't afford to upgrade and probably won't until it's absolutely necessary.

I understand, and it's certainly a valid point. They're certainly not cheap, and SDTVs are certainly adequate. But to try and say that standard definition is a better option visually to HD is just wrong. It's true that many modern televisions suffer from overly bright, over-saturated images and the motion-smoothing ruins the integrity of film. But as is pointed out within the article, these settings can be tweaked to achieve optimal film quality, and the inherent benefits of 24fps, 1080p resolution, lower compression rates, greater color reproduction and loss-less audio make Blu-ray and HD vastly superior to previous generations.

But yeah, I had a SDTV for many years and it served me fine, and it took me quite a while to afford to make the jump to HD. But you definitely shouldn't worry about upgrading to an inferior product.

I never said it was "better" , just saying that I prefer having a TV where I don't have to screw around just to get movies to look the way they're supposed to look. Right now I couldn't care less about Blu-Ray and HD, i'm not going to convert to Blu-Ray until DVDs are gone for good(which I don't see happening for a long time). I'm not an audiophile like most of you guys on here are, so I don't care that much about stuff like 1080p and lossless audio(I don't even know what lossless audio is) so soundwise I probably would not be able to tell the difference between a DVD and a Blu-Ray.

Plasmas didn't just lose the initial battle to LCD because LCD TVs look better on the showroom floor, as this article suggests. They lost largely because of the "burn-in" problem common in plasmas, where over time certain images on plasma TVs would etch themselves permanently onto the TV and be seen any time you would watch anything (ghost images is the term for these things).

Now, that issue has largely been corrected in current models of plasma TVs, but good luck convincing a consumer who's spent years hearing about burn-in to invest in a plasma over an LCD. It's the main reason why plasma TVs are so much cheaper these days. It's the only way to get anyone to buy them. Most sales people won't even tell you that current plasmas are just fine when it comes to burn-in.

I recently bought a 1080p LCD/LED TV because my old one was winding down (it's been moved into the bedroom until it finally goes). The article is accurate in what it states about the motion smoothing and brightness of the picture. It just overblows the whole thing with hyperbole. It literally took me 30 seconds to go to the menu and turn these things off when I set my TV up. The problem here is uninformed consumers who are hesitant to calibrate their own televisions, not LCD TVs.

In a sense, you're right. On an SDTV, no amount of screwing around will ever get a movie to look the way it's supposed to look, and there's no way it would take advantage of the differences between DVD and Blu-Ray.

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When tuning up my TV, I tend to approach it the same way as tuning up a guitar. On a guitar, if your strings are sharp, you don't tune down to the note. You tune them below the note so that they sound flat, then tune up to the note.

On a TV, I think it tends to work best to set all your settings (contrast, saturation, etc.) so that they're visibly too low, then raise them up to where they look acceptable. Starting with the setting too high can confound your eye's understanding of the "correct" look, because any setting below an unreasonably high setting is going to look better.

(This method applies to guitars and TVs for a very different reason, so don't expect the analogy to hold up under examination. In fact, I'm not even sure why I made the analogy in the first place. It's kind of unnecessary. Man, I'm hungry.)

Plasmas are preferable to LCD, but I would recommend buying a projector. Best home entertainment purchase of my life, for $150. You control everything; you can move it around the house at any time based on convenience, and the size of the screen can be whatever you want it to be. The "screen door effect" that you get with projectors is just something that's worth getting used to. Handles color well, and motion is perfect. My projector doesn't even have an hdmi input, yet it still looks amazing. As of now, I'd say it's definitely the way to go.

I got to experience the problems with Plasma burn-in at my parents house when watching The White Ribbon on blu-ray. A number Haneke's static shots (which sometimes lasted close to 5 minutes) actually burnt into the screen, so when the camera moved (or changed scenes), artifacts from the static shot would be smeared across the screen. It was rather distracting, and has since left me feeling rather sour towards Plasmas.