Why?
My parents just bought a Panasonic 53" flatscreen HDTV. Because it was the cheapest one whose brand they recognized.
Also, the people at the store told them that anything over 60" distorts the picture so there’s no point purchasing them right now.
My sister and her fiance just bought a 40something inch flatscreen plasma that hangs on their wall. It is cool as all hell but they already have a few dead pixels in the corner which is why my parents don’t want to go down the plasma route.
Just got a 65" Mitsubishi HD rear projection TV. No distortion I can see (unless I insist on playing Tetris on widescreen format. Then the shapes don’t fit quite right). Lots cheaper than a plasma or LCD, and a far, far better picture than what I had before.
Mitusubisha has worked ok for us before, I chose rear projection because it’s cheaper, we’ve got the room for it, and it’s proven technology which should look as good in 10 years as it does now. Also because I wanted to watch my Lord of the Rings EE DVDs on something approximating the theater experience.
Any flatscreen HDTV has (possible) distortion issues when it’s being fed a non-HD signal.
What’s going on is this: flat screens, be they lcd or plasma, are pixel-based. That is, there are a specific number of physical pixels that make up the screen. This is in contrast to tube-based displays which can display at multiple different resolutions, since the number of “pixels” they have just depends on how many scan lines they project through the tube. A consequence of this is that pixel-based screens of all types always look best when the signal they’re fed is the same as their physical resolution. This is commonly appreciated with regards to lcd computer monitors - most people are familiar with the way a native 1280x1024 screen looks like crap when the display resolution is set lower, say to 1024x768. Text, particularly, looks crappy, but you get visual artifacts from the rescaling all over the place. This is also true of HDTVs playing non-HD signals. The TV has to rescale the image in exactly the same way the computer monitor does. This can lead to a really crappy picture. I’ve just recently installed a couple of Pioneer HD plasmas that looked really very bad with ordinary signals (but gorgeous on HD channels). Some scale better than others, though, and the smart consumer will demand to see the screens being fed non-HD signals before making a decision.
Note that at the current time, all DVDs are non-HD. The only HD signals around are a few from your cable or satellite provider. Around here, that’s 10-20 channels, though I’d imagine some markets have more than that.
Note also that there are competing HD standards, and it’s not clear yet which will emerge on top.
I bought a 51(ish)" Sony rear-projection a while back. Of all the models I’d looked at, it was the “best bang for the buck” (plus I bought the display model, which knocked another 10-20% off the price).
60" Zenith rear projection LCD (I think).
Very impressed with the picture; HD looks gorgeous and normal TV also looks very good (just not as crisp as HD).
At the time we got it, last May, some quick web research led me to believe this was the best bet: not as thin or as expensive as a plasma screen, but not too bulky either (it’s about as deep as the 26" tube TV it replaced).
We’re happy with it.
I’ve had my 65 inch Mitsubishi rear-projection TV for over 18 months. No complaints whatsoever.