Good questions!!!
1. Yes, your conclusion is correct.
2. If you can afford the 50" go for it.
3. This is a long answer.
LCD or liquid crystal, crystals are very small so it is much easier to put a lot of them is a very small space.
Plasma. Think of a Neon sign, a glass tube with Neon gas in it and an electrial wire at each end. Run an electrial current through the gas and it will light up, called the plasma effect.
Each pixel of a plasma has 3 very, very small glass tubes
with a gas that will light up by an electrial current. It is very difficult to make them small. Untill the last year or so most plasma screens were 640x480 or EDTV.
Maybe in a couple of years they will get a 50" plasma to 1080i and 42" to 720p, but for now 42" at 1024x768 is a good as it gets. John
I'll try my best to make my question as simple as possible but I'm still fairly new to HDTV terms and facts. Here goes.
I'm reasearching plasma TVs so for simplicity sake let's say that I want a screen less than 50 inches such as the Samsung HP-R4252. Furthermore, I definitely want to view 720p signals which we know are equal to 1280 x 768 pixels. Here's where I'm confused: The Samsung along with many other like-sized plasmas have a native resolution 1024 x 1024 or less. Now assuming my math is correct, I wouldn't see 25% of the pixels when receiving a 720p signal on said Samsung (or at the very least there'd be some compression going on).
This all being said my questions are:
1)Is the above conclusion correct?
2)If so, would I be shortchanging myself with a plasma smaller than 50 inches?
3)Why is it that LCDs can acheive such high resolutions on smaller displays but plasmas apparently cannot?
Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic