Panasonic CT-27HL14 27" TAU Series HDTV-Ready TV
great television
this is a great television, and it is a big improvement over an analog set.  There are a few aspects of the tv that make it a #2 choice, though compared to the sony.  Consumer reports (2003 issue) states that not all hdtv's are the same in terms of the hd picture quality.  this is definitely true.  they rank (10 point scale) <br /> <br />sony 10 <br />panasonic 9 <br />samsung 5 (boy is Samsung bad. the king of fuzzy images) <br /> <br />the panasoic image is very close to the sony image, but not quite as good. images run prog. scan through a dvd player (not 720 high def., it is 480 lines (enhanced def.)when playing dvds prog. scan)  the image is very very good, but there is slight blurring (probably only noticable by those of us that are very detail oriented, but it is there. a good way to test is to turn on the subtitles and you can see how well the letters look).  I compared the panasonic and sony at the stores, with some difficulty becasue the images on screen keep changing, and rarely show a steady detailed image for long, but the sony picture (as of August 2004) were better than the panasonic.  I would have gotten the sony, but they didn't make a 27\\" hdtv in early 2004 when I got this set.   <br />Another advantage of the Sony is there are 2 component inuputs, this set only has 1, so you can't run a DVD recorder signal and DVD player into the set at once.  also sonly has 4 picture settings, panasoic only has 3, and two of them are really dark. the Vivid setting is the only one that looks good.   <br />The buzzing coming from the set is from the transformer (claims a repair person), that sound isn't from the speakers. a bit annoying, but there's nothing that can be done as far as I know to fix that. <br />one note on the s-video.  the s video images are really dark on this set.  I use the s video to get the closed captioning off some dvd disks that don't carry over on prog. scan, but it's unlikely many people will be using s video much unless you have a specific reason like i do.  It's too bad they seemed to have messed up the s video on these hd sets (I tested a few). that may have to do with the hd technology inside.  an anolog set may  give a better image that these hd sets with s video. <br />this is still a great tv compared to others and the picture is great, I would imagine these tvs will last a long time so one should make the best decision. ( I chose the 4 by 3 shape because that's the format I watch the most of).