do NOT buy a plasma.
i currently own an panasonic ST50. i have had nothing but problems out of the TV since i bought it. people try to lead you to believe that IR and other issues dont exist anymore in plasmas, but that is a complete lie.
if i play a game with a light colored UI for more then 2 hours, i will have IR for weeks. hell, my wife watched netflix with subtitles on for a few days, maybe 3-4 hours a day... and now we have permanent dark bars where the subtitled were at the bottom of the screen. they have been there for months now. it is burn in at this point, as IR does not last for more than just a few weeks at the worst.
there is absolutely no chance i would ever recommend a plasma to a gamer. no chance at all. IR is not the only issue you will run in to with plasmas... you will also see minor to severe horizontal line bleed which can be extremely distracting. also, screen uniformity is a common issue with plasmas as well. we arent talking clouding or flashlighting, we are talking areas of the screen that are tinted either pink or yellow. it is VERY common for panasonic plasmas to have one to two pink or green tinted blobs on the screen. you wont notice this during normal viewing, but if what is on the screen has a grey or light blue background (like the sky) you will see it, and it will be distracting. false contouring is also pretty common on panasonic plasmas. finally, phosphor glow is a big issue that took a long time for me to adjust to. basically what you will see, in fast moving scenes in games that run below 60fps, is a combination of judder and a ghostly image that is the reverse color of what is on the screen. it doesnt last long, but it is long enough for your eye to register that a strange color was on the screen. it took me months to adjust. check out a video i posted on youtube of the issue here:
make sure the video is set to 720p... and you can clearly see yellow and blue solid colors showing up where they definitely shouldnt be when the image is moving quickly.
LEDs with dimming technology are approaching plasma blacks.... and the drawbacks from plasma sets are too severe to even consider them. i personally will never buy a plasma again, eve with their SLIGHLY superior image quality. LEDs are just getting too close in image quality to consider a technology with so many problems.
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