Help me decide, Samsung LN52A650 LCD or Panasonic Viera TH-50PZ85U Plasma

[PhoenixAD]

This TV will have fairly equal use between watching normal TV, acting as a PC gaming monitor, and watching anime as a PC monitor. I plan on getting a PS3 in the future at some point but for now no bluray, just good ole DVD.

Panny Plasma
I really liked how the plasma looked in the store. When turning on a hockey game in SD, there was a night and day difference in clarity. The LCD looked very blocky and bad where the plasma still had a fair amount of detail. I really like the blacks on this TV as well. I am a little concerned with how much i've been reading about IR on the forum. This panny has the Pixel Shifter technology in it, but i've read it only shifts up to 4 pixels over so really is it kinda worthless?

I've read also on these forums that if you just treat the TV carefully in the first 200 hrs, you can minimize much of the IR in it's lifetime.

I've heard that plasma's noticeably start to lose brightness after a few years, is this true with the one I'm looking at?

Also another side question, can I get up to 1920x1080 resolution from my PC if i use a DVI->HDMI cable? Somewhere I read the VGA was capped at like 1370 or some garbage.

Samsung LCD
120hz that also looks pretty damn nice. This TV has a higher price point by about $300 for me. I've had lots of people tell me that this LCD will be better for gaming but I'm not a 100% sure I believe that. I really like the fact of not having to worry about IR at all.

A con of this TV is the very glossy finish that it has and I think that might really bug me after a while. The panny's glare was much less apparent.



Can anyone give me some insight here, yours opinions are greatly valued and appreciated

[reaper12]

Get the plamsa. It is better for gaming, movies, SD TV and computer use. With 100000 hours life It will be a long time before the brightness starts to fade. That's roughly 11 years watching it 24 hours a day.

Pc resolution through VGA is limited to 1366*768. But why would you use it? I use my PC connected to my panasonic plasma using a DVI to HDMI cable. You get full 1920*1080 with no input lag. I work from home and I use the TV for my computer monitor, for games, for movies for everything basically.

For the first 200hours just take it easy on the TV, you don't have to do anything special, just don't display things for hours and hours using crazy brightness and contrast. You will get advise to keep the contrast and brightness lower than 50% for the first 200hours, the best settings for the PZ85 all happen to be lower than 50% so this is not a problem.

You get very slight IR occassionally, but, It's nearly a non-issue. I do regular gaming sessions for hours with no problems.

[Trollslayer]

Panasonic rather than Samsung.

[Frameless]

The Samsung has 60-70ms of input lag! That's very bad for gaming and if you play fps-games online, you are gonna suck bigtime.

The Panasonic PZ80/85 has about 30ms of input lag. The Panasonic PZ81 has even less, with only 0-15ms of input lag, measured by Panasonic TH50PZ81B / TH50PZ81 Review

If you don't know what input lag is, it's a delay of the signal to the display. This will make movement seem slow responsive and what you see on screen may actually be dealyed by several frames from what is really happening in the game. With movies this doesn't really matter. An input lag of 60ms is 4 frames when you are playing a game in 60hz (forget about fake 100hz, that's just interpolation, no input accepts 100hz to this day).

Output lag - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(lol, someone has changed "input lag" to "output lag")

[PhoenixAD]

I did not realize there was such an lag there, it definitely makes me lean more towards the plasma. How do you guys feel about the extended warranties on plasmas? Worth it?