1. Buying one or the other TV will not limit your ability to view content designed for the other— because no such design differences exist.
2. Plasma TV is (still, may change) superior to LCD in terms of brightness, contrast and to a lesser extent color quality. This superiority (a) comes at a price (plasma costs more) and (b) is nearly invisible to the naked or untrained eye. People will bypass the “best” in favor of the “good enough” if there's sufficient price advantage.
I'm still watching a 1997-model 19” CRT, and so are a lot of other people. This year I plan to pick out a 32” LCD panel in 720p. 32”-ers are available in 1080p, but in that size I don't see the advantage to higher resolution. With a dreamland unlimited budget, I'd probably go for a 50+” plasma in 1080p and then die of butt calluses during my 4,853rd viewing of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.
I almost went with a Panasonic 42” 1080p plasma TV, but back in March 2010 they tended to use more power at reasonable brightness levels than the Sony KDL-40EX500 40” LCD I finally got. I do like the current crop of 42” plasma displays, though—they’ve really improved the power consumption and because plasma displays have a “natural” refresh rate of 600 Hz, it also means no motion blurring on very fast motion like what you see in action movies and live sporting events.
Hey, thanks for that. My thing was will there be just a standard TV where LCD would be the one? Are there many sales of plasma or that one with mirrors or whatever?
That was true just a couple of years, but no longer. The absolute best is now LED. Kind of misnomer since it's really an LCD with LED backlighting. Plasma can't hold a candle to a full matrix LED set.
Plasma is cheaper than typical CFL LCD now as well. LCD matured, Plasma just got old.