Quote Originally Posted by telum01
i have a 40" Samsung LCD. i got a helluva deal on it from Best Buy. the guy there said it was actually better than the comparable Sony (more/better hardware, but i can't remember the reasons he gave, something about a built in tuner or something or other, and something else). it looks great from any angle, and i've never had any problems with it whatsoever. but... i bought it at Christmas, so it's not exactly old.
sorry to say they lied to you.

if you wanna get one of the best out there period. get a sony xbr series. but the 52" is like 4k and the 46 is around 3k.

If you wanna get the best "value" tv meaning lower cost but still one of the best picture and reliability.

look into the toshiba HL167 series lcd's

42" for around 1620.. 47" for around 2250. Great tv's great picture.

If you wanan spend more get a sony, and not a samsung. if you look at the samsungs picture everytime you mix brights and darkst he samsung screen gets all hazy and foggy. the DNIE processor seems to make the image look worse. on the tv's we have at work ive turned the DNIE enhancement off and they look better. the objects, people etc look more real with it off.

Also samsung boasts alot of dynamic contrast ratio but thats irrelevant. what you want to look at is native contrast. Native means in one frame.. one picture how many different shades of grey can the tv do.. the dynamic means what is the overall full range.

having a 8000:1 DR and a 1000:1 NR is pretty bad. ussualy the ratio is 5DR:1NR. again samsung loses out in this deparment.

You will hear that samsung and sony lcd panels themselves are manufactured at the same plant. they are. sony and samsung partnered in this, but the biggest factor in your picture quality will be the image processor. and Bravia > DNie by far. read it up anywhere you want.

The new HL167 series toshibas are also great as they utilize the sony WCG-CCFL backlighting panel. Orignially developed by NEC but now sony is the main developer. To give you an idea, a standard lcd can only range 70% of the color spectrum a human eye can see. the WCG-CCFL panels can range 90% +.

Also stay away from lg... their picture is very lacking and their reliability poor. The most reliable of all the major companies out there is toshiba. but its not a huge diff from toshiba to sony/pana.

Oh yeah the HL167 series from toshiba are 1080p sets with hdmi 1.3 ports. for the price of this tv you'd get a 720p sony/samsung with 2 non1.3 hdmi ports.

so yeah if u want the very best get a XBR2 or XBR3 from sony.. if u want the best value get the toshiba.