blackdaniel

Yeah show your kids you actually care and spend some time with them:gd_partyu Buy them monoploy or something and interact with them, don't buy them a 299$ babysitter, get them something they could learn some actual skills from

Hey don't feel bad. So far I've spent 1200$ just on my girlfriend!

Yeah I know, the car comparison was a little over the top. Besides my "German" car was actually assembled in Mexico!

I'm not a math major by any means but it seems to me that 1920x1080 is equal to 2,073,600 pixels, 1024x1024 would be 1,048,576 pixels, 1024x768 would be 786,432 pixels and 852x480 would be 408,960 pixels. So besides the enormous pixel count of the full hd plasma the other two more common hd panels have roughly twice the amount of pixels that an ed panel has. You know the thing that jumps out at me is that for years I loved my Volkswagon. It handled great, has plenty of pep, is comfortable for long drives and gets me through ice and snow to go snowboarding. Its probably the finest car I've ever had the pleasure to own. But then a friend of mine let me drive his Audi S4. All of a sudden my Volkswagon drives like a brick, doesn't have heated seats, loses traction when it's wet, and that s4 hauls ass.... You know that Volkswagon looked great until I saw something better. The vast majority of consumers will think that ed looks amazing because they have been watching their tired old crt for the last however many years. And don't get me wrong, ed panels do look great. But once you've seen a 50" Pioneer Elite or Fujitsu you just don't see the same thing when you look at an ed plasma.

Wow you guys really get going about this ed/hd debate. I guess I'm just new to the forum world though! I think that uscboy has made a good point a few times that has been completely overlooked. For most applications the only reason you would want to buy a plasma is if you want the "cool" or "wow" factor of having one, or if you absolutely have to hang it on your wall. Most people would be perfectly happy with a dlp or lcd projection set. With all the 1080p dlp and lcd sets coming out now you can get a pretty good deal on a dlp or lcd in the fifty inch range. A friend of mine bought is 56" samsung for little more than 1500$.

Yeah me too! I took a pair of pants back to the store once because I just didn't like the color but I had them for like a month. Evidently they went on sale since I had them because they rang up at -$1.45. I decided to keep them and still don't like the color

Absolutely, I agree! Monster is full of margin, in fact when I worked for a retailer Monster let all of the employees buy Monster products at, get this: 90% off! They were giving us 90% off of their products provided that we made our purchases at pre-approved times (like once a year). I would routinely give customers a deal on Monster instead of selling them cheaper wire. When you get into higher end stuff it does make a difference to have higher end connections for your equipment. I have done side by side comparisons with monster products up against off brand stuff and you can see a difference. Well I should say I could show you the difference between the two. I have also done side by side comparisons with monster z series speaker wire and the cheap stuff hooked up to a good pair of speakers and you can also hear the difference. I was so impressed with the difference in the quality that I set up a dvd player with four different levels of quality of video cables and let the customers decide for themselves. 9 times out of 10 the customer would want to purchase something in the middle like a thx certified cable because they could see the difference too. I guess my point is I agree that Monster has a ton of margin, but if you read any Sound and Vision or Audiophile magazine, all the experts will agree that you should use good quality cables when you hook up your equipment. I don't know if you can see or hear the difference, but I can! By the way I would never pay full retail for any electronic product that I bought. Always ask for a deal when buying anything from a tv to a 500ft spool of speaker wire. TV's don't have a ton of margin but there is a lot of room to negotiate in wire, cables, power centers and speakers.

There are a couple of reasons to use monster on outdoor and custom install jobs but price is not one. 1. Monster xp (monster standard) is oxygen free copper wire which will stand up the best to corrosion and will function the best for the long haul 2. Monster in-wall is UL approved to be in your walls in the case if custom installation. If, god forbid, there was a fire and your house burnt to the ground you would have a hard time explaining to your insurance company that you wanted to use cheap wire. The type of wire you use should definately depend on the results you want to see. Of course I would always recommend in-wall wiring for custom install, but if you're just powering a couple of 20$ outdoor speakers you obviously don't want to spend more than that on wire. On the other hand if you are listening to a 5000$ pair of speakers than you want the best speaker cables available. It's an old saying but the chain is indeed only as strong as it's weakest link

You can buy speaker wire at home depot even I've heard, but depending on the quality you expect to get and the application I would keep in mind "you get what you pay for" Monster cable may be pricy but there is a reason that it is more expensive than other cheaper stuff.

This is a very common complaint with lcd tv's, especially entry level lcd's. Plasma's look more like the tv that you are used to seeing, because of the sheet of glass on the front of the plasma. I worked for a retailer and the biggest complaint with lcds would always be "My 10 year old tv at home looked better than this." I made it a practice to always show the customer what regular cable would look like on these sets, and it's like you said, very unimpressive. It has nothing to do with the cable box, or the cable at your house, and a set of thx certified cables should be great. The reason the regular cable looks so bad is because it is made up a certain number of lines of resolution which is matched up great with your old tv. Now the lcd that you have is capable of displaying something much better but is limited by the quality of regular cable which if I remember right is in the neighborhood of 300 lines of resolution. I'm sorry that I don't have a great explanation as to exactly why regular cable doesn't look good, but it is a very common complaint. I'm sure somebody here that knows more about it can give you a more technical explanation. There are a lot of advantages to lcd technology but making regular cable look great is not one of them. I hope this helps a little at least.

I spent 490$ roughly; the cost of the cc laptop without AOL. I had hope to pick up a few other things but after the laptop I was ready for bed!

I don't know if anybody here has any recent experience with Philips tv's but I worked for a major home electronics retailer that carried Philips products. We carried Samsung, Sony, Mits, Philips, LG/Zenith, JVC, HP, Pioneer and Fujitsu tvs. Out of all of the tv brands that we had the Philips tvs came back and went into service over and over. They had an LCOS set that was finally recalled because of constant problems and we had five open box 34" hdtv tube based sets on our floor up until the day we closed our store because they just wouldn't sell, or if they did it would come back with a problem. The picture on these sets looked like you were watching tv without your glasses on; everything was a little blurry. The store manager actually suggested moving them away from the other tvs because side by side you would never pick the Philips. The real problem in my opinion was the defects in the tvs. Inputs wouldn't work, lines through the picture, turns itself off, everytime the power would go out you would have to turn one of them on then off then on again to get a picture. We affectionaly called all Philips products "boomerangs" because you knew if you sold one, it was coming back. Don't even get me started on their dvd players! I'm not trying to pick on any brand or be overly negative but it got to the point where I was scared to sell a Philips product because I knew that when my customer called later that day or the next day it was not going to be to thank me, it was to complain that his tv is acting up. We would set up care calls and the delivery person handling the call would ask us "Is it a Philips?" first thing. Don't be afraid to ask a sales person about the track record of tv brands. Most sales people want you to be happy and would tell you if a brand was in for service more than other brands.

There are quite a few reasons that you would spend 80$ more for a higher quality product. Just becuase the brands are related does not make two tv's equal. Looking at the ads it looks like the Insignia 32" tv would probably be the one that is priced right now at 269.99. It does not have component imputs for an increase in quality for some sources, it does not have a digital comb filter to clean up the quality of your lower quality sources, and the remote is a simple basic remote. The Toshiba has a digital comb filter, component video connections, a universal remote with light up display and analog audio out connections for some people that may use these for a stereo or headphone connections. There is also the fact that in a more expensive set the internal components and connections are held to a higher standard than in the cheaper sets. There is a margin for error when manufacturing tv sets and this margin gets much smaller in a more expensive set. It is the intangible reliability factor that often comes when you "get what you pay for". Sorry chrisb but I didn't see any actual information on the high def tv's but tend to agree with others when I say that Samsung does make a quality product right now. When you go with a cheaper product not only do you lose reliability and some connections but you also sacrifice convenience. Often these sets will not have all of the features of the more expensive ones, for instance a hdtv that I saw on sale last year did not have the option of changing the aspect ratio of incoming programming. That may not be a big deal to some, but could drive others crazy. Out of all of the tvs you listed you'll have to be the one to decide hd or non-hd but remember that hd shows the capability of the tv. A non-hdtv and an hdtv running the same dvd in the same player, or the same non hd programming next to each other the hdtv will look better because it can. They will both take the same signal and display it to the best of their ability, but the non-hd tv is limited in what it can display.