inches and over

After a year of shopping, my wife & I decided to experience this puppy. Granted that all plasma t.v.s look great, this one on the show floor looked a tad better, so we sprang for the extra bucks after first getting a sale price, then a 10% discount ontop of an additional 10% discount. It was merely a horribly expensive unit instead of obscenely expensive that way.

At home, we had an installer scheduled to come out and mount it on the wall, but we couldn't wait and went ahead and did the installation on the pedastle, which is a two person job and takes about 3 hours, with the constant fear of dropping something on the screen. We didn't break anything, but I don't recommend self installation unless you have nerves of steel.

After haggling with the cable company, we added HDTV service and after about 5 days managed to review the unit in the following modes:

1. analog cable t.v.
The image quality is good, probably superior to regular NTSC quality. Key advantage is you can toggle the 5 or so image scale modes to make it fit just right. There is a progressive distortion mode that while stretching the image to fit the 16:9 from the NTSC standard, does it so well that there is no obvious distortion except for the rare case where you see what should be a circle in one of the corners. The image size is such that you really can't take in the whole screen at once so it's a rarely if ever noticed distortion and visually quite good considering the low quality of analog broadcast
2. digital cable t.v.
Probably not a great idea. You have two modes on the Hitachi and 3 modes on the cable box to scale the image, and they seem to fight eachother resulting in a less than stellar picture. I actually prefer analog for quality when all settings are done. I would suspect the same issues with Satellite, but I'm not ready to add that to my gadget list to be sure.
Special note for folks who have "movie on demand" fantasies. NONE of the "movies on demand" are HDTV format. Maybe next year. I'm disappointed, but with my cable company, not Hitachi.
3. digital 1080i cable t.v.
Granted, this device is not a 1080i display, it's 1,280 by 780, but however it down-converts the signal, it's an amazingly clear picture. The only concern you might have is looking at the imperfections on people's faces that are normally invisible. I mean, how many of you will find your attention distracted by looking at the details of the hairs growing from a mole on the interviewer's face. Sometimes, detail it too much of a good thing, but by all that's holy, it's remarkable detail and quality. My suspicion is that satellite folks will love this mode too. HOWEVER, there are very few HDTV channels right now, and I'd say, like all t.v. wasteland material, maybe 1 or 2 has something interesting.
4. svideo DVD
A high quality display that looks fine, but you'll discover that frame sizes vary depending upon DVD producer's whim and you may find yourself toggling among 6 different display modes trying to find one that won't burn-in and that looks good too. I don't have the HDTV composite version of a DVD player so I can't comment on that and I blew my toy budget for the next 3 years so it'll be a while before I know how wonderful that feature is.
5. RCA jack vhs video
This is the worst image quality mode, due to the source. however the analog variable image scaling works well, and the picture is better than when displayed on the baby 30 inch sony 3:4 that this replaced.
6. RGB output from a PC
Jury is out here. I've hooked 3 different PCs into this and know for sure that your milage will vary. Depending on which version of Windows you have, whose display driver you have, etc, etc, you will either get a stunning image of your desktop, or a stunning distorted image of your desktop. Be warned a 1280 X 780 display is obviously not the top display mode debugged by video card driver makers. It's not that you won't get it to work, but you may find that your actual display size is, well, funny. Hitachi has a nice "auto size" mode that at least gets the desktop to fill the screen, irrespective of what the video card driver wants to do. You can browse easily, clearly, and start shopping at once for a wireless keyboard and mouse. We did.
7. Universal remote vs. Universal remote
There were actually three settups done for us. The one my wife & I did, the one the official installer did, and the one the cable boy did. Each of us knows how a system should be wired, and how the universal remote should be programmed. At the end of the day, I had THREE universal remotes, sony, cable company, and hitachi. Each programmed by the mad mind of the perfect configurator. At the end of the day, the universal remote that works best is the Hitachi, which surprised me. The cable guy insisted that it would never work with the cable box. I discovered that it works better with the cable box than the universal remote that came with the cable box. That doesn't mean you will have ONE universal remote. Mixed vendors = mixed results. I can now get by with TWO universal remotes, provided I keep a third nearby. Driving 5 different vendor's devices with 2.5 remotes ain't bad.
8. Burn in
Hitachi says, never keep the side bars (normal HTDV display) on for more than 15% of the time, lest thou shalt melt the phosphor and destroy your display. I looked at the persistance image after turning the device off (in the dark), and my guess is that 15% is the maximum. I plan on keeping it down to as close to zero as possible. If you plan on using this with a PC, make sure your screen saver is really on, and really doing a dynamic or BLACK display unless you want to see START on the bottom of your display for eternity. (apologies to MAC users)