I'm looking to replace my aging RPTV...57 inch...due to various reasons. I looked at various LEDs, LCDs, and Plasmas in Best Buy the other day. Sometimes you really can't tell the better pictures since I noticed they had quite a few of them with the brightness jacked up.
I was in the same situation, with an aging 50" DLP. There was a big difference between how different sets looked at Best Buy, versus what those sets looked like at Paul's TV: At Best Buy, within the brands we were considering (Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and LG) some were clearly better than others, while at Paul's TV all the sets were practically just as good as each other, and all better than they looked at Best Buy.
Conclusion 1: The folks at Best Buy either don't know how to, or don't care to, set televisions up correctly.
Conclusion 2: The decision with regard to which has the best picture isn't going to be obvious, and indeed, we're in the realm, now, perhaps, of personal preference being the main determining factor. Some folks will care to defer to electronic measurements; other folks will recognize that their eyes probably cannot detect minute differences like that. (Having said that, I went for the "better" set -- more on that later.)
I don't care about internet ready TV's, etc I have all that in devices already. Don't need 3D right now either.
What I've found in my research is that some of the features and qualitative characteristics that I wanted most, in a good "non-3D, non-Internet-connected" television, were
only available on 3D-ready, Internet-connected sets.
As it is, we decided on the PN58C8000. We could have gone with the C7000 or C6000 but the C8000 has a display designed to better deal with incidental light in the room, which is somewhat of a concern, and bone of contention, between my wife and I. The extra few hundred for the C8000 is easily accounted to marital peace.
A question I have is... do the TV's today pass the audio out from the HDMI via the optical? So I could just say plug in 3 or 4 HDMI devices and output the optical to my 6.1 system? My receiver does not do HDMI switching and I really don't feel like buying another one of those either.
The short answer to your question, for us, was "no". From the PN58C8000 manual, "DIGITAL AUDIO OUT (OPTICAL) ... 5.1 CH (channel) audio is available when the TV is connected to an external device supporting 5.1 CH ... " but " ... When the source is a digital component such as a DVD / Blu-ray player / cable box / STB (Set-Top-Box) satellite receiver and is connected to the TV via HDMI, only 2 CH audio will be heard from the home theater receiver. If you want to hear 5.1 CH audio, connect the digital audio out jack from your DVD / Blu-ray player / cable box / STB satellite receiver directly to an amplifier or home theater. ..."
Other televisions may work different, but I think that that's doubtful -- I suspect this limitation is a reflection of the HDMI specification, because why else would Samsung provide 5.1 sometimes, but not other times? (Does anyone know for sure?) Regardless, this set, at least, won't do as you suggest. The multiple HDMI inputs, as far as I can see, are really intended either for specific purposes (see below) or for use when you don't have a sound system, and will instead just use the television's speakers.
Regarding "specific purposes", the PN58C8000 has one HDMI input designated for ARC. That is the way that you can get multi-channel digital audio to go from the PN58C8000 to the receiver, but of course you would need a receiver with an ARC-compatible HDMI port.
I went though a few hours of creative home theater topography work this weekend to try to figure out what to do with the issue you've raised, because for me it was not an option to connect all my existing devices through my existing receiver -- I'm getting a new 3D Blu-ray disc player, and my existing receiver does not support HDMI 1.4, which is somewhat necessary for 3D. Luckily, for me, there was an answer. I could continue to use my current receiver for my "other" digital devices, feeding the receiver into the PN58C8000 as one of
its inputs, and feed my new Blu-ray disc player directly into the television, with a separate optical digital audio connection from the Blu-ray disc player into the receiver. That is not a return path, like you were suggesting, but rather simply a split from the Blu-ray disc player: Video going through HDMI and audio going through optical SPDIF.
Of course, this kind of solution won't work for you unless your receiver has lots of SPDIF inputs, and your other devices all have SPIDF outputs.
