"Gray Bars"

Or better yet stretch.

Why anyone would deliberately distort a picture when they spent a ton of money to get a pristine reproduction of the signal coming in is just beyond me! Deliberately stretching a picture is really silly when you think about it. But that is just my opinion :)

See ya
Tony
 
The only advantage plasmas have is that they are brighter. They suffer from a "screen door effect" i.e. the picture looks like it has mosquito netting over it. All plasmas have this issue. The clarity and color transitions also arent as good as a good LCD or DLP. I've never seen a plasma TV that looks as good as the cheapest DLP. IMHO they're an overpriced, underperforming technology.

The main advantages of plasma quality that I've read are 1) the picture has no noticable change in quality at any angle you look at it (although LCD's have improved a lot here apparently), and 2) deeper/darker black saturation (again, LCD's have apparently improved considerably here too).

One other note too, the screens of LCD's are more along the lines of a laptop screen and can be damaged much easier than a plasma which is closer to traditional glass. Something maybe to consider if you have kids running and throwing stuff around a lot (but the softer screens also help with the glare I mentioned earlier).


But taking everything into consideration...I went with LCD.