Budget is $1000 - $1200. I am primarily going to be using it for gaming, family is probably going to use it for movies. Lag is a big issue, for my PS3 and especially for my ol' PS2. Is there any HDTVs that have no upscale or post processing lag? So what's a good brand? What's a good contrast ratio to look for? Plasma, LCD, or other? What else should a I look for/avoid?

Plasma is good for bigger TV's, LCD for smaller TV's. Given your budget, you're probably going to want a smaller TV. Yes, you could probably get up to a 60" on that budget, but TV's vary significantly in quality depending upon the model.

Good brands are typically your big name brands. For price to performance ratio though, Samsung is the best imho.

In terms of input lag, it's something you're just going to have to get use too. If not the lag created by the TV, you'll have upscaling lag. Don't worry, it's heavily overrated and outside of a few games not feeling as smooth as they use too, it's not that big of a deal.

I'd just suggest, get a couple models that you think you'd be after, and go down to the local electronics store to check them out. Different people behave differently, and just because one TV might appear perfect to one person, doesn't mean it won't look like **** to another.

My buddy just bought a Panasonic 50" Plasma screen. It's beautiful. Only $900 [grin]

We've bought several Samsung LCDs at various sizes. They've got nice mid-range features and aren't too pricey. These is the second large Samsung I've bought -- the previous was CRT widescreen which was 10 years old and actually still going strong; so reliability seems pretty good. We only switched to effectively widen the room by the two feet less thickness of the screen :-)

They do have a "game mode" which is specifically designed to reduce the display lag. Personally, I'm mostly a Wii gamer, so I don't really play that intensely to notice, but it's there.


The one thing we have had trouble with is feeding the sound into a separate 5.1 decoder and getting the two lags to match.... It seems to vary by channel... Eventually I simply tapped the sound out of the TV (which delays it to match the video processing) and turned off as much of the delay in the decoder as I could and we can live with the result.


Oh, and the maintenance interface is **incomprehensible**, but then we don't exactly use it a lot...