Customer Rating: 
Summary: satisfied
Comment: Amazon was a very good company to deal with, no problems and no hassels. The TV has been great, and I am very satisfied with the whole transaction.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great TV with a few caveats
Comment: This was my first HDTV purchase. As such I did weeks of research reading every review I could find and poring over forums. In the end I found that this was one of the best picture quality/price combos you can find.
I used a DVE DVD to calibrate the picture (just the basic brightness and contrast, no color calibration yet). Overall I found most of the opinions I read to be right on. Always use the Movie mode with "Warm2". I could see possibly moving up to Warm1 or normal but I trusted the experts out there who say that warm2 has the best color fidelity.
Aside from that I kept all the extras off (Noise reduction, DNIe, auto-contrast, etc). I had an HD cable box, Xbox 360, PC and HD-DVD player hooked up (all HDMI except the PC which was through the VGA monitor hookup). All looked great. On the Xbox though I found I did actually like "Game Mode" better with some other adjustments quite different from my movie watching settings.
The picture quality on this TV seemed awesome to me. Even with the "energy saving" mode on High, contrast at 90, and Brightness at 45 it seemed plenty bright, although our living room doesn't have a lot of ambient light either.
My 2 big gripes with this TV were:
1. Image Retention. This thing has BAD IR. Sometimes I would turn the tv on and just the text that flashes up telling you what input your on would leave some IR. Now to be fair the IR has always gone away after some watching or running the built in "scrolling" screen. I'd play Rock Band for 30 minutes or so and would definitely see IR from elements of the interface. I would run the scrolling screen or watch TV for a while and all would be fine. Nevertheless, very annoying to me. I love the History Channel but would refrain from watching it because they use such a vivid, bright annoying logo on screen at all times that it would very quickly cause IR.
2. Possible noise appearing as green dots in the blacks. Now I managed to get rid of this by turning my brightness down (the level at which I ended up setting the brightness was still within the calibration range and still made for a great picture so I didn't need or want to turn it up any more) but there was definitely a threshold where if I turned up the brightness past a certain mark, dancing green dots appeared in the blacks. From everything I've read this may be perfectly normal and only really noticeable if you're too close to the TV. The fact that I could achieve a perfectly good picture while dialing out these dots made it pretty much a non-issue for me, but it still kinda bugged me and made me wonder if that was indeed normal. The more you turn the brightness up the more green dot noise would appear, but again it still wasn't too terrible from a decent viewing distance.
If I had it to do again, I would not get this TV. While it has some great features and a great picture quality, the quirks just get to me a little too much. Maybe it's just because I'm new to the whole world of HD, but I find myself wishing I'd gone with the Samsung LN46A530 LCD instead.
Great bang for the buck, especially if you're primarily a movie watcher, but I'd be wary if you're a gamer or want to watch anything with a vivid logo, scrolling ticker at the bottom, or black bars (like non-stretched 4:3 TV).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great TV! Awesome Picture! Occasional HDMI audio drop
Comment: I've had this TV for a while now and have been very happy. It's great having all of the input options. I have experienced the occasional audio dropout when using HDMI as others have referenced, but I know only use the HDMI for video processing and route the audio through a receiver so problem solved for me!
Customer Rating:
Summary: GREAT TV FOR THE MONEY
Comment: THIS TV IS ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS IN HD. I CAN'T SAY MUCH ABOUT REGULAR DIGITAL TV STATIONS, I DON'T THINK THEY LOOK TOO GREAT. BUT, THAT'S WHAT MAKES THE HD LOOK ALL THE BETTER ON THIS TV. THE MENUS ARE A CINCH TO NAVIGATE AND I LOVE THE SLEEK BLACK CASING THE TV IS IN. THE SOUND ON THE OTHER HAND IS NOTHING TO BRAG ABOUT ALTHOUGH I HAVE MINE HOOKED UP TO SORROUND SOUND, SO NO PROBLEM THERE. GOOD VALUE FOR THE MONEY
Customer Rating:
Summary: Big and cheap but has image retention
Comment: I had a Hitachi plasma prior to this that never had burn-in or image retention problems, ever. So needless to say I was not worried about this when buying a plasma. I figured the technolgy would be the same because I bought the Hitachi almost 2 years ago. Know I understand what image retention really is. It retains images pretty quickly, I thought this would go away after the "break-in", but it still does it. If you do the scrolling screen burn in feature it goes away. It is a big TV and has a great picture for the price, but if you are going to not like the fact that it does have image retention that goes away I would not buy it. However the better plasmas are probably going to run over a grand more. Overall I would say I would definitely buy it again, but the image retention is a pain in the butt.
Summary: satisfied
Comment: Amazon was a very good company to deal with, no problems and no hassels. The TV has been great, and I am very satisfied with the whole transaction.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great TV with a few caveats
Comment: This was my first HDTV purchase. As such I did weeks of research reading every review I could find and poring over forums. In the end I found that this was one of the best picture quality/price combos you can find.
I used a DVE DVD to calibrate the picture (just the basic brightness and contrast, no color calibration yet). Overall I found most of the opinions I read to be right on. Always use the Movie mode with "Warm2". I could see possibly moving up to Warm1 or normal but I trusted the experts out there who say that warm2 has the best color fidelity.
Aside from that I kept all the extras off (Noise reduction, DNIe, auto-contrast, etc). I had an HD cable box, Xbox 360, PC and HD-DVD player hooked up (all HDMI except the PC which was through the VGA monitor hookup). All looked great. On the Xbox though I found I did actually like "Game Mode" better with some other adjustments quite different from my movie watching settings.
The picture quality on this TV seemed awesome to me. Even with the "energy saving" mode on High, contrast at 90, and Brightness at 45 it seemed plenty bright, although our living room doesn't have a lot of ambient light either.
My 2 big gripes with this TV were:
1. Image Retention. This thing has BAD IR. Sometimes I would turn the tv on and just the text that flashes up telling you what input your on would leave some IR. Now to be fair the IR has always gone away after some watching or running the built in "scrolling" screen. I'd play Rock Band for 30 minutes or so and would definitely see IR from elements of the interface. I would run the scrolling screen or watch TV for a while and all would be fine. Nevertheless, very annoying to me. I love the History Channel but would refrain from watching it because they use such a vivid, bright annoying logo on screen at all times that it would very quickly cause IR.
2. Possible noise appearing as green dots in the blacks. Now I managed to get rid of this by turning my brightness down (the level at which I ended up setting the brightness was still within the calibration range and still made for a great picture so I didn't need or want to turn it up any more) but there was definitely a threshold where if I turned up the brightness past a certain mark, dancing green dots appeared in the blacks. From everything I've read this may be perfectly normal and only really noticeable if you're too close to the TV. The fact that I could achieve a perfectly good picture while dialing out these dots made it pretty much a non-issue for me, but it still kinda bugged me and made me wonder if that was indeed normal. The more you turn the brightness up the more green dot noise would appear, but again it still wasn't too terrible from a decent viewing distance.
If I had it to do again, I would not get this TV. While it has some great features and a great picture quality, the quirks just get to me a little too much. Maybe it's just because I'm new to the whole world of HD, but I find myself wishing I'd gone with the Samsung LN46A530 LCD instead.
Great bang for the buck, especially if you're primarily a movie watcher, but I'd be wary if you're a gamer or want to watch anything with a vivid logo, scrolling ticker at the bottom, or black bars (like non-stretched 4:3 TV).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great TV! Awesome Picture! Occasional HDMI audio drop
Comment: I've had this TV for a while now and have been very happy. It's great having all of the input options. I have experienced the occasional audio dropout when using HDMI as others have referenced, but I know only use the HDMI for video processing and route the audio through a receiver so problem solved for me!
Customer Rating:
Summary: GREAT TV FOR THE MONEY
Comment: THIS TV IS ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS IN HD. I CAN'T SAY MUCH ABOUT REGULAR DIGITAL TV STATIONS, I DON'T THINK THEY LOOK TOO GREAT. BUT, THAT'S WHAT MAKES THE HD LOOK ALL THE BETTER ON THIS TV. THE MENUS ARE A CINCH TO NAVIGATE AND I LOVE THE SLEEK BLACK CASING THE TV IS IN. THE SOUND ON THE OTHER HAND IS NOTHING TO BRAG ABOUT ALTHOUGH I HAVE MINE HOOKED UP TO SORROUND SOUND, SO NO PROBLEM THERE. GOOD VALUE FOR THE MONEY
Customer Rating:
Summary: Big and cheap but has image retention
Comment: I had a Hitachi plasma prior to this that never had burn-in or image retention problems, ever. So needless to say I was not worried about this when buying a plasma. I figured the technolgy would be the same because I bought the Hitachi almost 2 years ago. Know I understand what image retention really is. It retains images pretty quickly, I thought this would go away after the "break-in", but it still does it. If you do the scrolling screen burn in feature it goes away. It is a big TV and has a great picture for the price, but if you are going to not like the fact that it does have image retention that goes away I would not buy it. However the better plasmas are probably going to run over a grand more. Overall I would say I would definitely buy it again, but the image retention is a pain in the butt.