We bought a Hitachi 55" television about two years ago. We absolutely love it. It has never given us any problems. It has a very featured menu where you can leave another member of the household a message and they will get it when they sit down to watch TV. You can set reminders for yourself and you can set it to automatically turn off. It has input jacks so you can use it as a 55" computer monitor...come on, some of us have vision problems but hey, I think 17" is ok, at least for now, for a computer screen! We get a lot of enjoyment out of it. When we got it we all of a sudden became everyone in the neighborhoods' friend. Ahh.. who can blame em. I would say though...you need a substantially sized living room for a TV of this size. Get the dimensions of the room you are planning to have the TV in and take them with you shopping and the dealer has a chart there that shows the correct size of TV you would need for the room. If you get a TV too large for the room..you will suffer from eye damage after some time. When you first get the TV in your house it is a bit overwhelming in size, but after about a week it gets smaller and smaller and you become sensitized to it's size. All in all the TV is great for personal enjoyment and for entertaining guests.