I bit the bullet this time and bought an Pioneer PDP-5070HD PureVision 50″ Plasma HDTV - having looked at CNET and Amazon. The 50″ may a little too big for our living room (although hey there’s no such thing!) but it is a visual pleasure.

Some key observations-

HD programming is limited, waaay too limited right now. It did force me to watch more of Discovery however and see things that were invisible in the past on a regular TV.

TBS cheats. Seem to watch some sorta pseudo-HD with major pixellation which is an annoyance.

Regular programming can look like crap on HD. I set mine at 4:3 to eliminate most issues.

You need a better cable box that supports HDMI. I had to return my Comcast box and get a brand spankin new one, which is actually smaller and has more DVR space - so that was a good deal. I did have to drive down to Livermore however to get it.

You dont have HDMI DVD Players in the market. There’s one from RCA at about $80 that is too one dimensional for me - looking for a next gen home theater system with Bluray/HD-DVD with HDMI outputs. When will that come?

Plus, want to throw in a SlingBox. So who said Im not all geeked out ;-)