Samsung HP-R4252

Pros: Good price, lots of features

Cons: Cannot turn DNie off, clay face

Summary: I purchased this TV over Christmas. I was agonizing over this set and the Panasonic. I finally settled on the Samsung because it was about $800 cheaper and had more features and better warranty.
The TV was easy to set up and the picture looked okay at first. Although, after watching a few DVDs I started to noticing that the actors faces looked really bad (the bright parts of their faces looked supper saturated and pixelated). I believe this is what is called 'clay face' and is a result of the DNIe feature of the tv. This wouldn't be a problem if you could disable this feature but you can't.

This set does have some image retention as well. One of my family members accidently left a test pattern on the screen for a hour. This image could be seen afterwards. The good news is that Samsung has several features that can remove this. After about 3 hours of the white screen, the image retention was gone. But I recommend you try to avoid any static images for the first 100 hrs but this is true for all plasmas.

Overall, this TV is decent and some of the pictures look really great (e.g HD tv). However, the faces of the actors is really starting to bother me especially in scenes where there are headshots. In these scences, the images look pretty bad. I've tried to calibrate the set using DVE calibration DVD but cannot resolve this issue. I am seriously considering returning this TV and getting the Panasonic which is really a shame because I really want to like this TV. In the end I will have to decide if this problem is worth $800. Although, I would recommend that you check this tv out and decide for your self