Insignia 42" 720p Flat-Panel Plasma HDTV

Pros: Clear picture, good sound, great price.

Cons: I wish is had a piano finish.

Summary: My relatives had purchased this TV a few months ago and I was able to watch a range of programming while visiting over the holidays. I watched HD Football, DVDs, as well as regular TV and I have to say I was very impressed. I bought one for myself as soon as I got home.

The native resolution is only 720p but when I was at BestBuy debating over various TVs I was very hard pressed to notice a difference between the 1080 TVs vs. 720 TVs. I will say that TV's costing $1800 looked a little brighter, and a little sharper, but that's over DOUBLE the cost of this model. It turns out, this TV is actually an LG covered in Insignia clothing. If you go to the TV menu in the store you'll notice it's identical to the equivalent LG model. The LG sitting next to it was $996, while this one was only $799. I'll keep my $200 and sacrifice a piano finish.

Since setting mine up I've noticed several features:
1) the new cover is black, not gray anymore, which for me is a good thing. It's not piano black, but it still look sharp and the speakers along the bottom remain grey.
2) It has surprisingly good sound out of the box, even though I'll be hooking up a surround sound system in the next few days. 3) I love the zoom features. You can tweak the picture to make it fill the screen or show original 4:3 aspect ratios, but I'm guessing this is fairly standard.
4)HD looks excellent on this TV. Since programmers are only broadcasting HD in 720 anyway, the extra resolution is wasted unless you're watching Blueray or HDDVD and even then, the difference is minuscule. Trust me. The difference between your old CRT and 720 is so dramatic, that the difference between 720 and 1080 ends up being almost negligible.

The bottom line is that for $799 at BestBuy, this is an absolutely incredible deal. The picture is bright and clear, the blacks black, and clean sound out of the box. I was looking at TV's for around $1000 and this one stood out as a fantastic deal. For $996, Insignia offers a 1080p with piano finish, but I opted to save the $200 for the tiny, and I mean tiny, trade off in picture. Three years ago this TV would have cost $3,000 or more and here we are in 2008 with a range of 40" and 42" televisions costing under a grand. God bless capitalism.