Pioneer PRO 1410HD vs Sony KDS-R60XBR1

.....degrade over time. However we are talking a long time. Most quality plasmas have a 60,000 hour expected life rating which I think most manufacturers mean at what life the brightness will be at half the original.

If you average 4 hours a day watching time we are talking here about 41 years!

If you use common sense and turn down the brightness and contrast to about 50% or more which I think you will find is very realistic for the best picture quality, you should have no problems. Also follow the recommended rules for reducing burn-in. No 4x3 signals for the first 100 hours and no more than 10% 4x3 for the next 900 hours (use the strech modes 100% of the time, which you will find you will always use after you become adjusted to them) and turn the brightness and contrast down (these are good recommendations to extend the life of all displays). Use the built in burn-in reducing features. Burn-in is only a current problem in the minds of the paranoid.

The real test is to forget all the talk about burn-in and fading brightness on plamsas, it is no longer a concern. Choose based upon the best picture quality and any aesthetic or functional or feature differences that might be important to you.

RR6

I appreciate the info. I was wondering if burn was still a real problem today. I did see a post where somone did expirience some burn in after a few weeks. I guess the only question for me, how does 720P compare with 1080i?

frames per second. I believe 720 does 60fps, while 1080i does 30fps. Where this comes into play is in fast moviing images and such. I agree with the previous post. Go to a store and compare both models side by side, ask ig they can put them side by side or spend a good couple of hours looking at them very meticulously and with a very picky eye. Play with the settings and try to set both of them the same wat so that you can look at the similarities and differences of each set. When you set them up leave every setting in the middle (brightness, sharpness, color, hue, picture, iris, etc), that should give you a baseline to start from).

No one will experience burn-in in several weeks unless they have watched the same image for 24 hours per day, with a static picture or a black border that never changes.

This will never happen even over years if you follow the reasonable rules above and never leave a static image on the screen for any significant time. More than several minutes. I am careful. If I pause a movie instead of hitting the stop button when I take a break, then I put the movie in extra slow reverse motion. This keeps the pixels moving, just common sense. Plasmas are not for static images. If one watches nothing but 4x3 tv and does not stretch the image then of course you will eventually have a burn-in problem. If you watch the financial channel only, 8 hours a day, with the ticker on the bottom then you could have a problem. Normal TV use for Television and DVD movie watching is no problem.

720p and 1080i give almost equal picture quality. 720p is slightly better for sports and moving images and 1080i is slightly better for static images. If I had the choice of watching HDTV in either 720p or 1080i, I would choose 720p.

RR6