Alright, both of these tvs are excellent choices, so you really can't go wrong either way, but it also makes the decision that much harder. This battle kind of embodies the whole Plasma vs LCD debate, which also extends to DLPs, and beyond, but we don't have to deal with those here, so let's just keep the discussion focused. Both of these display technologies have been around for a while now, so they're mature with most of the problems in manufacturing processes figured out, meaning: you're not going to see any major problems with either of these sets. You're not going to see burn-in on the Plasma, and you're not going to have to stand directly infront of the LCD to appreciate it.
Looking at the specifications, the Plasma has the edge, as it's 2 inches bigger (negligible though), sports two HDMI inputs instead of one, has a much better contrast ratio, which is true of all plasmas compared to LCDs, and Plasmas also have a better response time. What does that mean? Good LCDs usually have a response time of less than 10ms, however even at that level some sensitive people can still see some weird images which is known as Ghosting
. For fast moving objects they leave a ghostly trail because the tv isn't able to update the image quickly enough. This effect is really evident on old cell phones when playing games like Snake, but for modern tvs still isn't much of an issue. Still, if you're sensitive enough to be able to detect this phenomenon it can ruin your appreciation of the tv. And really, when you're spending this much money on something the slightest problem can really hurt.
Now plasmas aren't immune from these types of problems. Where LCDs have ghosting, Plasmas can be known to show an effect known as the Rainbow Effect
. Again, this only matters to a very small portion of the population whose eyes are sensitive to these kinds of things. As an explanation, the rainbow effect causes a rainbow of colours to appear when there's fast motion on the screen. And just like LCDs this can totally ruin the television watching experience. A good way to test if you're susceptible to this effect is to put a white image on the tv screen and then wave your hand in front of your face, if you see rainbows then tough luck.
Fortunately, if you don't see any rainbows (or ghosting with LCDs) then you never will. It's not something that you can be trained to see, or will see over time, you're either born with it or you're not. So it's definitely worth taking some time to take a look at these tvs to determine if you run into any of these problems, because if so then that tv will be out of the question.
The other big questions that need to be answered are the matter of how the televisions scale their source imagery. Some technical information follows, just a warning for people reading. Both of these televisions have a different resolution than the standard NTSC broadcasting. The LG displays in 1024x768, and the Sony displays at 1366x768. Now, the Sony does have a better resolution, but they're so close that's not really a deciding factor, really it just negates the small size increase the LG has. Ok, so what do these numbers mean? Well, tv shows and movies come in a variety of formats, these are 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, and some exotic stuff like Blu-Ray movies come in 1080p. So these numbers are different than the numbers that the tvs display right? So what that means the televisions have to do some scaling to the source information to make the images display properly on the screen. This matters because bad scaling can make the picture look really really bad. You're going to have to look at these televisions displaying content from all kinds of sources, from standard definition tv, to digital tv, to high-def tv, to video games and high-def video games. Now, that's only if you're actually watching and using these things. Maybe you only watch high-def tv/movies, and only play your 360, in that case you only have to test out those things. Any video store worth its salt will be happy to run various tests for you so you can appreciate the qualities of the scalers of these sets. Because a lot of the time, these things are the most important factor that determines how good of a picture you really get when watching stuff.
Now, like I said before, both of these tvs are running off of pretty mature technology, as a result I'd imagine the internal scalers contained within them both are pretty darn good, and should provide you with an excellent picture.
Alright, at first I was pretty set on recommending the LG Plasma for a variety of reasons, especially when you look at the difference in price ($1000 in our data). However, if the price is close to each other, such as within a few hundred dollars then I'd recommend getting the LCD. The quality of both sets is pretty much the same, but there are just a lot less nagging issues with the LCD. LCDs are more durable, you don't have to worry about burn in at all, and LCDs work at high altitude whereas most plasmas don't (ya, I know that's pretty random, I just found that out now so wanted to share).