Buying a new HDTV? Think about going with a Plasma.

Tax season and super bowl season are upon us. For those of you getting a nice refund you might be thinking about getting a new HDTV, and the time has never been better. I just finished up my taxes last night and and expecting to get my return (about $1,600) sometime next week. I told myself that I was going to buy a new TV with my tax return, and that’s how I realized how cheap these things have gotten.

But Plasma TV’s SUCK BALLS!!!

This is actually a myth. Yes indeed, it’s actually the other way around when you spend about 10 minutes and compare stats and prices. To make it simple I’ll give you an easy comparison, with a rough estimate on the price.

Plasma TV

• Contrast Ratio: 2million : 1
• Refresh Rate: 600hz
• BURN IN PROTECTION (eliminates burn in unless you leave your tv on a static image for many many many countless hours)

LCD TV

• Contrast Ratio: 30,000 : 1 (if you are lucky, and this is probably dynamic)
• Refresh Rate: 60hz, 120hz, or 240hz (price goes up…)
• Don’t worry about burn in.

Okay now before you go “that comparison sucked” I just wanted to be very brief with the examples. Yes you can buy a LCD TV with a massive contrast ratio, however you pay a huge premium on that. Plasma TV’s just have great contrast ratio’s to begin with and go from there. The refresh rates on Plasma TV’s are great as well, 600hz. That’s over twice as fast as the fastest LCD TV’s on the market today. Not only that but you can get that Plasma TV in a 50″ flavor with 1080P and just barely break the $1,000 mark buying a Samsung. The only other thing is burn in, which has been resolved for Plasma TV’s. The issue with burn is just having an image stuck on the screen, which only happens if that image is on the screen for a long period of time. How do they fix this? Pixel Shifting is a pretty common way, and what does is it moves each pixel ever so slightly, so slight that you wont notice it but it moves the image enough to not risk burning it on the screen.

The Price Is Right!

By all means you can spend $1,500 on a LCD-LED TV that will have a great picture. However you could get the same (if not better) picture, in a larger screen size if you get a Plasma TV. If you can stand not having a 1080p TV (which I actually might just get a 720p) then you can save even more money, Samsung has 720p TV’s in the $800 price range
. With the money you save buying a Plasma TV you can get a home theater, and really experience your movies and video games more than you ever could with just that expensive TV with tinny speakers. Or if you want to get a 2nd Plasma TV you could actually buy 2 for the price of 1 decent LCD TV, so why buy an LCD? I don’t know, if you do please tell me in the comments.

Need I Say More?

There really isn’t much more to say to try and convince you to buy a Plasma. So if you need some more convincing go visit your local big box retail store (Best Buy perhaps?) and just look at their Plasma TV’s and look at their LCD TV’s. Their source video isn’t that great, however you should be able to notice that the Plasma TV can display deeper, richer blacks than the LCD. This is why movie buffs buy Plasma TV’s, and sports fan you have an insanely fast refresh rate so you don’t have to worry about motion blur. The decision is yours but I recommend a Plasma over any other HDTV, any day.

If you can stand to wait a few days for shipping I suggest Newegg.com for your Plasma TV. The reason being is you don’t have to pay tax (or at least in Illinois you don’t, may be different from state to state) and they almost always give you free shipping. So you save even more money, unless you could talk a sales person into dropping the price so it breaks even  with the online price. Which is quite possible I could have gotten $200 off an already cheap Plasma TV today, as I don’t have my tax refund yet I had to decline (and also it was still going to be $1,100 which was more than I was looking at, Panasonic might be better, but I can’t tell the difference so I’ll just get that nice Samsung)