Samsung PN50A450 50" HDTV Plasma TV

PICTURE QUALITY:
Picture quality and true color reproductions are excellent! Flesh tones are perfect! Gone are the days of trying to get the "blacks" black w/o darkening the entire picture. As well as getting the sometimes over powering "reds" toned down a bit w/o loosing the richness of the other colors. This TV has separate adjustments for the "flesh tones", the "black" levels and the "white" levels. While I've had limited results w/the white levels, the blacks and flesh tones work great! The rest of the colors are adjustable with a simple color slider or... you can break them down and toy w/them individually too, along with color temperature, gamma and presets. Analog channels are a bit fuzzy as I'm only running straight cable to the TV , no cable box. Although w/the built in "QAM" TV tuner my local channels that broadcast High Def over the airwaves for free are passed along through the cable company too! Ex: CBS is normally on channel 3 for me, channel 3.1 is the digital/HD channel, HD quality is excellent! Couldn't pull these stations in w/my old TV set.

SOUND QUALITY:
Sound quality is "OK". Nothing wrong with it, just OK. Even though it has a 5 band equalizer in it for fine tuning the sound, it doesn't seem to have the same "kick" that my old set had....a 42" Mitsubishi rear projection.

FEATURES:
This TV has a ton of features except for ..."PIP" [picture in picture]. For me that wasn't enough to knock down the star rating. I didn't use it on my old TV which had the feature.
One thing this set has is a 15 pin computer monitor plug that lets you use it as a second computer monitor. I'm viewing it at about 8' away [as a monitor] and picture quality is great. Even a cell phone camera picture that normally is displayed on my 20" monitor as a 4x6" picture, is displayed as a 12x18" picture on the 50" plasma and is surprisingly clear! It's great for viewing or showing pictures. I also have a security camera hooked up to it through one of the RCA jacks. The jacks are auto sensing so when you are toggling through your TV/video inputs it automatically only shows the ones that are being used and not the ones that are idle at he time. I also use Netflix, so the movies that I view instantly on my computer screen... I now slide them over to my TV screen where we can enjoy them while sitting back on the couch instead of crowding around the computer desk. I hope I'm not boring you too much but, these are all great benefits that I didn't have with my old TV set.

COST-BENEFIT:
When I bought this set it was during a 3 day special [Circuit City] that had an extra 10% off. paid $1169.00 plus tax. It was 5 years ago that I paid $1699.00 for half the TV that this one is. With the price drop on LCD's and Plasma's over the last 5 years they're all a bargain. I don't think I could have done much better than I did with this Samsung, I'm very happy with it!