You're talking about convenience, when you say convergence, not quality of performance...
True, but something gaining popularity as a result of convienience doesn't mean the quality is terrible. Look at smartphone cameras: at first they were a joke with less than VGA resolution and terrible cheap sensors leading to washed out, artifacted pictures. After some years of refinement it is now possible to take excellent pictures on the better quality ones, especially if you know how to adjust settings on the device and do a little post production later.
We can liken this to how LCD panels have improved - certainly the blacks aren't as deep as a good plasma and motion suffers a tad if you don't have, say, a 200Hz panel, but we can't take an LCD panel set to "showroom saturation" levels with the sharpness down and all the colours blown out and compare it with a CalMan adjusted plasma and call it a fair test.
A properly adjusted LCD will hold it's own against a properly adjusted plasma - it won't beat it but to most people's eyes it will not be far enough off the quality level to justify the price difference. Only quality hounds like a fair percentage of the people here (myself included) will really care that much about the difference. As I pointed out in my example, most people don't even do basic calibration on their LCDs, so them dropping more money on a plasma and then not calibrating that either is an even bigger waste, don't you think?
When converging you are always sacrificing something...LCDs don't play jack-of-all-trades any better then plasmas...if you choose LCD you will have artificial picture, excessive motion blur, bad viewing angles, tinted and cloudy blacks, which is all very good if you are web surfing, text editing etc because those failings don't matter
...but if you want to enjoy accurate video and fast games, plasma is better in most cases...
LCD TVs are excellent jack-of-all-trades - your stereotypical mid-range one will do a variety of things to a good standard, while a plasma will do a few things incredibly well and not be very good at others.
Incidentally I don't know what kind of LCD panels you've been looking at but with correct colour temperature and turning off the dreaded "soap opera" effect post-processing, as well as picking a panel which can sync to a player's refresh rate etc you can get impressive results. Once again I'm not saying LCDs can beat plasmas, because in my experience they can't and don't. I'm saying they're not a poor man's substitute for one if they're set right, that the gap isn't as wide as you're making it out to be. Modern ones have low latency - even budget models can get you under 20ms now. Other than slightly grayish blacks now and then most of the LCD panels I come across have excellent picture quality after a little setup.
convergence is OK if perfomance is of no great consequence...but since some people want (or at least they pretend to want) to watch film content in as accurate manner as possible, they will choose plasma because LCD is just a lousy compromise they accept to be able to use their PC with it...there is nothing wrong with that, but at least don't pretend then and turn a blind eye on the fact that you didn't get the display technology that will also do films and videos justice...
Yes but if you argue with that mindset technically you could say that watching Blu-ray content doesn't count as an "accurate" way of watching film content, one that "does it justice" and that only a 35mm (or a 70mm why not, if you can find one) projector dealing with film stock is accurate enough, that 1080p (a "mere" 2.1 megapixels) is too much of a compromise, that even DTS-HD doesn't measure up and so on. If a person's attitude is too purist then that's the logical conclusion. Because on the sliding scale of things, plasma isn't good enough if quality is the be-all end-all either.
Taking cheap shots at PCs doesn't help your cause either. A good modern HTPC can sync 720p and 1080p display modes at refresh rate to match the content and some of them have hardware deinterlacing abilities that match or exceed that found in top quality standalone Blu-ray players. nVidia is doing some great work with ION2 for example, and the amazing thing is that's just scratching the surface of what's out there now and what will be available in a few years time. And as I noted, an ancillary benefit of a HTPC is that it works well for light computing too. Once again I have to write I'm surprised you can't see the benefits and have zero respect for people who do things differently.
Not from my experience - if you set the resolution right (1920x1080), eliminate overscan in gfx card driver and use progressive scan modes...
What are you doing there? Are you saying that the setup makes all the difference when using a plasma as a PC monitor? Great. Because that's what I've been saying about LCDs all along... if you configure them correctly, the gap between them and a plasma is not that wide.
Perhaps you can gracefully step down from that rather tall horse you are astride now?
