Oops... just found out about this thread!
I recently demo'ed the NEC VP4 and was quite happy with the picture, especially relative to its rather low price (being just a monitor, no mess no frills does help of course). Extensive connectivity, vibrant and realistic colours, excellent blacks (Pana-ish), reasonably low picture noise, an overall "cinema" feel which I personally enjoy. And yes, some colour banding but I've seen worse before (very disappointed with new Hitachi series on that aspect).
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Btw colour banding/posterization/false contouring are indeed the artefacts which I can least stand with plasmas, especially on skin tones and faces (oh those green lines... ugly ugly!!

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The main reason (beside its "low rez") I passed up is that the VP4 DVI connection is non-HDCP; until we understand better all this DVI/HDMI/HDCP vs HDTV issue I feel safer getting a plasma with HDCP.
As for the XM2, beside its higher rez 1024x768 it's supposedly a marked improvement over the VP4 (new glass) however I'm still looking for a place where they'd have it on demo. AFAIU (from the avsforum) only the XM2/S (Silver) model is HDCP compliant, while the plain XM2 is not

. Comments from that forum are pretty enthusiastic over the XM2 btw...
Lastly, the Fuji P42VHA30 that you ordered uses the Pana 6 glass, I've briefly seen it running a movie and it looked great. Only thing is, Fuji removed the DVI connection - let alone HCDP! Strange since the previous gen. (VHA20) did have a DVI-HDCP input...! Is Fuji going backward on HD...?
