“Stay away from LCDs, at this point they don’t have the picture quality, black levels or reliability of the big plasmas. At your price point though I don’t know if you can get 1080P on anything larger than a 42 incher.”
From what I’ve seen, the latest, high quality LCDs have excellent picture quality and black levels. The Sony XBR2 LCDs, for example, look excellent to my eyes. Also some Phillips (!) LCDs I looked at a couple of weeks ago were looking pretty good. All 1080p.
I still like plasmas, but you have to go to at least 50” to get 1080p in a plasma screen, and those are still a little pricey. The Panasonic 42” HD Plasma is very nice, however the resolution, IIRC, is only 1280x720 - which still looks great on a screen that size from a reasonable viewing distance of say, 6 feet or more.
Actually, Panasonic 42-inch plasmas have a resoluton of 1024x768, not 1280x720. They use rectangular plasma pixels in order to present a natural 16:9 aspect ratio. Most 42-inch plasmas are 1024x768 resolution (Pioneer, Vizio, Samsung, etc.).
But Panasonic did just release their first 1080p plasma in the 42-inch size (earlier this month). Not cheap though - $2499 list. I think the 50-inch model is a better value.
-CB