can't complain about the price, size and quality- seems like a pretty good bacon i'd hit it if i were in the market

i have the th-50pz85u and i love it, the only complaint i have is that it's super glossy so sometimes you get a little glare

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I had a samsung plasma; within 2 weeks it had burn in on the sidebars, and there was ghosting of the 'rock meter' from guitar hero on teh screen for a day after 2 hours of play
... circuit city got it back within 30 days

#24, see #12's post. You probably didn't do anything to the settings when you got the television. Plasmas and lcds aren't like the old tube tv's you are used to. They need to be calibrated because the factory settings are set for the tv to stand out in a store setting amongst other tv's. That means the brightness is set to its highest settings.

burn in is almost non existent anymore, the technology has come a long way from the early days...even the more privative plasmas rarely had burn in issues. The on thing that "can" still be an issue is IR or Image Retention, meaning that after a certain amount of time having a stagnant logo and such that the image will retain in the phosphors for a while. The remedy is to keep the phosphors running after IR is noticed and just switch channels till it disappears. Only foolish use of a plasma could result in a burn in at this point (ie. stock ticker stations for days without turning to anything else). The problem with having black bars on the side or top while watching a plasma is that it causes the phosphors to burn unevenly, which even burning is only really important for the first 100-200 hours. Ultimately a lot of peoples complaints about plasmas is because they are misinformed. The truth of the matter is that plasma's (at least for now) continue to reign as having the best picture that money can buy. I personally game on my 42" plasma for hours on end and have never noticed anything more than minor IR, but as I said..bacon goes away quickly. Plasmas used to need to be placed in dark rooms, but that is been fixed by antiglare filters. Power consumption has come down a lot from the originals and my Panny for example is an energy star. LCD are still trying to catch up to Plasmas, but are still grossly more expensive for the size and suffer from slower refresh (unless you are willing to spend hella money) and lesser quality image.

#25 is correct, as most tvs that come out of the box LCD and Plasma are set in something commonly called "torch mode", which has everything possible to make it the brightest tvs. Companies do this to ensure that in a well lit store that their tv is one of the brightest and for that, it will hopefully stand out. The best setting are usually less than 0 or 50% depending on the measurements of your television. Leaving it in torch mode and playing games with Huds, watching tv with black bars on the side, or watching stations with logos stationary constantly on the screen is just plain moronic..bacons rodeo cowboy like #24 that ruin the name for plasmas

#12, I like your analogy, so does it mean that I shouldn't watch TV shows like Girl Next Door and watch only preaching shows like Joel Osteen to avoid burn-in issues?

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#28, Osteen isn't a preacher, he's the Billy Mays of warm and fuzzy televangelist charlatans.
The sheep eat that sh up.

#24, you don't pull a brand new plasma out of the box and play games or have black bars on it, no matter what the picture settings are at. They need to be broken-in for 100-200 hours, no black bars, no static images in that time when the phosphours are new and most prone to burn-in.

Don't believe that plasmas won't burn-in anymore, that's manufacterer hype. That stuff about brightness/contrast and burn-in is only partially true. Yes, it will burn-in faster with the contrast higher but lowering it doesn't make the TV burn-in proof. If I watch 4x3 with black bars for 30 minutes at less than half brightness/contrast I can definitely see where the bars were if I watch full screen afterwards. It goes away after watching full screen for awhile but I have no doubt if you watch enough 4x3 with black bars it will be there for a long time if not for good. I played a super nintendo game for about an hour one night with the brightness/contrast low, it took three days of fairly heavy TV watching for all the IR to go away. And yes, my TV was properly broken-in for 200 hours. I have last year's 42" and this year's 50", they are both the same.

Don't get me wrong here, I love my Panny plasma. Just don't believe these people who tell you burn-in is a thing of the past and you don't need to worry abouit it anymore or that brightness/contrast settings lowered will eliminate the problem, neither are true. New plasmas may be less prone to burn-in but they definitely aren't about the same as CRTs were as manufacterers claim. When was the last time you saw burn-in on a CRT? And why did CRTs never have anti burn-in technology? Because burn-in was extremely rare with CRT and plasmas will burn-in. You just have to watch smart with a plasma, be careful with static images and watch those black bars, it's the price you have to pay for superior PQ.

Good Price, but BB customer service is horrible.

I had actually been running the Samsung's built in 'burn in protection' more than it suggested to try and prevent/remove the IR. I dont know if any of the IR was actually permanenet (never kept it logn enough to know) but even after hours of running ht eprotection I still had teh IR of the side bars from viewing in 4:3

wow, mofo is a stalker.

#33 the TV wasn't broken-in. You can't just take a new plasma out of the box and watch TV with black bars or static images. It takes a minimum of 100 hours to break-in a plasma. Burn-in protection running or not, the bottom line is the TV wasn't broken-in.

LCD is better.

#36 I want some of what you're smoking.

Picked one up last night in store for 999.99 + tax, funny though they still had it marked 1399.99 in the store and not the online price. They weren't even aware the TV was on sale. Good deal in my opinion for this size / quality TV.