HAHA Forum! I laugh in the face of your attempt to eat my post! I copied to Word before I submitted!! HAHA!

Ahem.

I spent a ton of time researching these things last December when I purchased my current tv and since then, the market hasn't changed too much except for some replacement models of last years sets which are basically the same thing.

For me, I knew I wanted a 50-60" Plasma right off the bat. I looked at all of the LCDs and while a couple of them were quite nice, they just didn't look as nice to me as the plasmas. A nice plasma just looks...richer. I dunno. The only LCDs I seriously considered were the Sony Bravia and Sharp Aquos. Both look great but again, when I compared them to some of the plasmas, they just didn't do it for me, especially when price was thrown into the mix.

And that is the other main variable. How much do you want to spend? I knew right off the bat that I wanted to spend $2,500 - $3,000. I figure I'm going to have it for quite a while and I'll be using it A LOT so I might as well invest in something nice. I also knew that I wanted HDMI (which most of them ended up having anyway) and some sort of PC connection.

After looking at a metric assload of plasmas, the first one I gravitated towards ended up being the one I purchased, the Pioneer PDP-5070. Hands down, its got the nicest picture, highest quality and greatest looking build of all comparably priced sets. The only other plasma I considered was last years Panasonic 50". Its also a great looking set at a lower price but the Pioneer is definitely the better of the two. I went to pretty much all the electronics stores in my area (Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry's, Magnolia, Compusa, Microcenter) so I saw a lot of freakin' sets, and the Pioneer was basically the nicest. I also did my fair share of AVS reading and the Pioneer seems to be a pretty popular set there. The thing about AVS is, while you can find a ton of info on pretty much any particular TV, its sort of difficult to figure out which set most people favor since everyone raves about pretty much everything. It seemed like Pioneer and Panasonics were popular though.

After I figured out which one I wanted, I looked for the best price, which is pretty much always going to be online. I googled Pioneer Authorized Dealer and the first hit ended up being Pioneer's actual website where they provide links to like 25 authorized online dealers. Its important to buy from one of these dudes because then Pioneer will honor the 1 year warranty which I believe includes in home service. I bought my set from Beyond Plasma. Their website looks straight out of 1997 but they offered the best price (with insured shipping) and I got awesome service. I actually ended up purchasing the PDP-5080 for my parents about 6 weeks ago from them and everything went swimmingly. I think they carry all the major brands and I imagine they've got decent prices on those as well. As far as the warranty goes, I figured I was buying a pretty high quality set and I didn't worry about it too much. What I did make sure to do was to put it on my American Express which upped the one year in home service to two years. Pretty handy.

So I'm pretty partial to the Pioneers. There are other great looking sets but for some reason I liked the Pioneers the best. There is an Elite version of each of the Pioneer's and while the salesmen will tell you they look better, I found that it was pretty much not true. The only difference with the Elite is it has a display adjustment thing where you can make fine adjustments to a bunch of display settings. It also has a network connection for some kind of HTPC feature. It seemed interesting but I couldn't find too much information on it online and I was going to be connecting mine to a computer anyways so the non-Elite version was fine for me. There was also the HUGE price difference.

Finally, I know you said you wanted 1080p and I did too but after I looked at the price difference, and thought about how often I'd actually have a 1080p source, I went with a 1080i set. Now, in December of 2006, there was a greater price difference then there is now; prices on the 1080p sets are definitely coming down. For shits and giggles, I just called Beyond Plasma to check what the difference was and they are selling the 1080i Pioneer for $2,595 delivered and the 1080p Pioneer for $3,599 delivered. If I were in the market again, I would probably go with the 1080p since the price difference is less now. If you don't want to spend $3,599, there is a great Panasonic 1080p that I saw at Price Club. I forgot the price but I remember it being pretty good.

Dude, this post got way too long but I thought i might as well share. Slow day at work and all.

Edit to mention the burn in thing. Apparently, while this is still an issue, some of the sets have built in "burn in reversal" features. I think it flashes a white image across the screen for a long time and it basically reverses the burn in. According to some people I talked to, you can do it yourself as well by doing the same thing. The guy at Beyond Plasma said to put a pure white image on the screen for several hours and that it would help significantly.