good value for large screen HD

Just purchased the Sony 46" TV a few weeks ago and so far I've been very happy with it. I compared flat screen LCD, plasma, DLP, ICOS, and projection LCD before the purchase. The picture on all formats were all pretty good and I could not tell much difference unless I was looking at them side by side. I had purchased a 37" flat screen LCD a year ago for my mom because of space limitations where we were to place that TV. This time I had some more room and wanted screen size over slimness. I feel the picture of this projection LCD is equivalent to that of the LCD flat screen. There's pros and cons to projection TV, anticipate ~$200 in a few years to replace the lamp. However after lamp replacement, you should have almost a new TV again. Plasma and flat LCD may loose pixels or have burn in that cannot be corrected by a lamp replacement. this will be an individual choice, but picture quality seemed equivalent. I did however seem to consistenly see a slightly better picture with the JVCs using the ICOS technology, but DLP looked just like LCD. I choose not to pay extra for the 1080p TVs since I mainly watch TV and regular DVDs with no intention of buying blueray DVD players any time soon. The only current device that can take advantage of the 1080p vs the 1080i (720P) is blueray. So far, I'm happy with my decision. Using an upconvert DVD player to upconvert regular 480p DVD to 1080i made only a slight difference to picture quality. I haven't tried a true HD DVD on a HD DVD player yet. I once saw a blue ray disc on a 1080p TV and that was incredible, but for me not worth the total extra cost of ~2000. I got my Sony 46" from Circuit City on sale for $1000.

The set up took my less than two minutes since I had already hooked up all my cables from the satellite, stereo, and DVD players prior to bringing the TV into the house. I only had to plug in a few wires to the TV, plug it in and was in business. I took another 5minutes to customize my sound and picture settings using the TV settings menu. However I find that I usually use the factory set defaults for "vivid" for the picture setting and "dynamic" for the sound. The sound is OK, not bad,but not great, but when I watch movies the sound is running through my stereo system anyway. I was a bit disapointed in the Sony's audio out RCA jacks and have re-routed those wires directly to my satellite box output instead resulting in a much higher output level to my stereo.

This TV seems much lighter in weight when compared to other projection TVs. I really wanted to buy the 50" model Sony, but in a side by side compare, the 46" was brighter or more vivid after setting both TVs to the same settings. The sales guy said most likely the 50 and 46 use the same lamp and that's why the 50 was not as bright once the picture was projected larger. So, I bit the bullet and went a little smalle to get the better picture. I'm glad I did since this TV looks huge once in my living room, the all look smaller in the store. I initially stayed away from project due to the start up delay, but the sony is about ave on start up delay at ~15 seconds. I've seen some take ~30 seconds and one brand only took ~10 seconds. I can handle 15 seconds...

For the price, to get a name brand large screen, you can't go wrong with this Sony.