I find that rear projection sets just don't compare with the good old tube... Just my opinion.

You haven't been to my house and seen my carefully-calibrated and tweaked Mits showing an anamorphic widescreen DVD. The quality is there, in spades. With decent source material (i.e., anamorphic widescreen DVD), I prefer the picture of my RPTV to any tube TV.

You experience is probably with some older projection sets. They've made great strides recently. The old projection sets were dim, had bad off-axis viewing, etc. That's all been fixed with recent models.