Community Matters

Here’s an interesting question that I spent way too much time on the last few weeks. There’s a ton of useless information on the Internet. Tons of content that basically reprints specs or (even worse) vendor press releases. But very very few sites that have really solid technical reviews. Must be because there’s no money to be made with that. Weird - it seems to work in other segments (as Anandtech and Tom’s Hardware seem to indicate).

So I went through the “LCD or plasma” cycle. Well, there are full resolution 1080p LCDs that almost are affordable. And LCD doesn’t burn in. So that one’s easy, right? Not so fast. Doing some side-by-side comparisons I am not convinced that LCD actually looks better. And for the same amount of money you clearly get “more” plasma than you get LCD… for me it came down to angle viewing (hey, my babies are looking at the screen from way low, right?) and value for money. And on that plasma wins.

Armed with that decision I started studying specs and finally narrowed it down to a few Panasonic plasmas - either the industrial TH-42PHD8UK (which means you buy then stand and connection modules for things like HDMI separately), or the consumer model TH-42PX60U (that comes with a stand and a couple of HDMI inputs). (side note - Panasonic makes it so hard to link to their products that I simply decided not to add a link here - it’s their own fault).

And then a sales guy that I end up on the phone with talks me into considering the brand new Hitachi 42-HDS69. And boy am I glad that he did. Comparing the picture at two stores that had it side by side with the Panasonic (of course after adjusting the picture setting… man these stores have contrast and brightness pulled up to 100% - that’s just terrible!) made the decision easy. The Hitachi looks much better - and it has three HDMI inputs instead of just two.

I’ve had the TV for a couple of days now and I love it. So much fun when watching soccer in HD…

So as much as I like the Internet for looking stuff up - nothing beats standing in front of the actual TVs and comparing what you see…

Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?