flat screens

[Troy]

Plasmas have a shiny/reflective screen so if your room has a lot of light sources (or windows during the day) it will make viewing a pain. I pretty much only watch movies at night so I don't notice.
Troy

Yes, very shiny, so you almost have to be looking at them straight on or you'll pick up some glare. Even then you'll see a glare if you've got lights on that are in your line of sight. They weigh a lot more than the other types too so if you've got a TV alcove above a fireplace or something similar you'll probably need a hand getting it up there. There's also more of a burn-in risk with plasma and they use more power and get hotter.

I do like the plasma picture but I think many of the LCD sets have caught up in that area. All of them have drawbacks.

How often do you pick it up? I'm not a weight lifter by any means and I can easily move mine by myself - and I have 3 times already to different rooms as the house was getting remodeled. It sits on a normal glass stand but will also work with every wall bracket I've looked into. Now, our old 57" rear projection was a beast! At least 300 pounds. Someone actually stole it and I felt sorry for them. You could see the wheel tracks where they tried to roll it across the driveway (after taking it down the stairs). Saved us from having to haul it to the curb.

As mentioned, I was primarily interested in a great picture in a dark room. Our LCD upstairs has some glare when the lamps at the ends of the couch are on. I can imagine the plasma would be much worse but the LCD doesn't completely eliminate it. It's the little things that you don't think about in the store that usually bite you when you get home.

Troy

[hatersaurusrex]

If I remember right, plasma cuts the power to create black where LCD makes black by turning on all colors.

Exactly right, and to follow on to that, the reason Plasmas have darker 'blacks' is that LCD and LED are backlit, though slightly different in how they approach it.    I did a crapload of research on the differences so now I'll pass my knowledge on to you since most people I ran into were trying to sell me something and gave me only half the story:

Each pixel on a standard LCD screen is lit all the time from the back.   How this works is there are light sources typically mounted on either side of the screen that use a zillion little fiberoptic connections to channel a tiny beam of light in behind each individual pixel from the main light source, and it's always on because it comes from a shared source. As Troy said, in order to create black, the LCD has to basically blacken the pixel up to block the light from shining through.  It works pretty well but there's still a 'grayish' feel to it from bleed through.

LED-lit LCD screens (what most people mean when they say 'LED TV') do have an LCD display out front and are also backlit, but there's a significant difference: there's an LED backlight for each individual pixel which can be switched on and off by the TV. The advantage is that when you have black on the screen, the pixel blackens up but also the LED for that pixel is also off so it's really dark.   This provides better contrast and better blacks than a standard LCD screen, but LED type screens can be prone to what's called 'bloom' when you have high contrast images playing - for example if there's white text on a black background.   The light from the LED's behind the white pixels will bleed over into the dark spaces, causing kind of a halo of light around the lettering.  Some LED TVs are better at this than others, but it can be seen to some degree in most of them.  It's barely noticeable in most cases.

Plasmas don't do either.   Each pixel is its own light source which is why these TVs suck more energy out of the wall than an old-school projection display does pound-for-pound.    Each pixel is only lit and colored right when it's needed and provides its own light, so you get better richness of color and the darkest blacks with no bloom around the edges.   Suffice it to say I love the crap out of my plasma.

The upshot is a nice plasma can be had for cheap compared to some of the others, because people are still afraid of that pesky 'burn-in' which is pretty much non-existent anymore.   Like someone else said, a decent plasma will have a pixel shifting algorithm that creeps the screen around a pixel at a time so you're never stuck on the same image, mine has a dimmer so if it detects the same thing (like a movie on pause) for more than a few mins it darkens the display, and all the remote functions bounce around the screen so they never sit in the same place.

Hope that helps.

[hatersaurusrex]

Oh and one last thing, there are true 'LED screens' where each pixel has its own AMOLED for color, but those are only in cell phones and the like right now.   A full sized one would cost gillions of dollars, but they really are pretty.  My Samsung phone has one and it goes really easy on the battery as a result.