Okay, so the other week my parents bought a 42" hyundai plasma television as a retirement gift to themselves. Woohoo says I.

Anyway when I went to visit them I took my mac with me to show dad and do some work etc etc. When I connected the Mac mini to the plasma DVI port and brought it up on screen, I was truly amazed!

The quality of the image - crisp, mint, perfect - whatever you want to call it! I just was blown away.

Now, my question is this: if an apple 30" display is $4900, and a 42" plasma is $3000....why on earth would anyone buy the apple display?

and nevermind giving me the whole tech spec rundown, cos i know the specs of each and there are pro's and con's for sure. but lets think about this seriously. this is almost a $2000 difference. not to mention a 12" difference! the performance of the plamsa - in my opinion of course - was flawless. i'm sure the lcd performs very well also, but well enough to warrant a smaller screen size and 2 grand extra price? i think not. add to that the fact that i can have my mac, my pc/laptop, my xbox, my ps2 and gamecube, dvd player and vcr all connected at the same time and accessable at the touch of a button, i'm picking the plasma anyday!

i'd like to read peoples thoughts on this matter.....moreover, if anyone actually agrees with me on this one the floor is yours...

Resolution

and burn in

Not to put to finer point on it... you're missing out on 3 309 568 pixels. (2560*1600-1024*768)

Over three million pixels you don't see. we could go into things like dpi and stuff... but that would just embarrass the hyundai. I'm not saying it's not a good TV. It probably is... but as a hi defintion monitor it stinks.

Its all about the desktop space

My folks did excatly the same thing... Although they got an LG.

The picture is fantastic, though, even a cheap 17" lcd will give more "real estate" on the screen.

Also if it is a $3000 odd plasma, chances are that its not true HD, most of the cheaper plasma screens are usually 852x480 or so, where as a cinema display is 2560x1600, which means you really have about a third of the space on a plasma, even though the screen is bigger. (unless you send a higher res signal to the plasma and have it scale it to fit)

edit: for watching movies, a 30" just seems overkill, a plasma of any res will do that quite well, but when you are dealing with text (html code etc) or manipulating images in photoshop, then thats where the apple display will shine

all valid points. however the majority are under the assumption that a user requires a particular resolution for desktop space, or some such.

personally, i look at it this way. my 19" lcd is perfectly ample for the high intensity work that is to be done on the mac, no question it is a much better display for extended periods of time in front of the pc etc. and no doubt anyone who is able to buy a cinema display most likely has a quality display already, only a smaller size.

i guess it boils down to hearing from people WITH a cinema display that can verify what they actually use it for. do they spend 9 hours a day in front of it writing code, or do they use it every now and then to view media. if its the latter then i would think sticking with a smaller screen for intensive work and going for the plamsa for media would be a much better bet.

or maybe i'm just too much of a prude when it comes to shelling out $$

gehenna but remember that you 19 inch LCD probably has a high resolution than the 42" plasma display. A quick search on the web for 42" Hyundai found this now its resolution is 1024x768 the same as my 12" iBook! while my iBook is nice it doesn't have the most screen real-estate so imagine that same screen made 30" bigger! no extra pixels just bigger pixels.

I would probably like that plasma display as a TV but as a monitor no I will stick with my 23" Cinema Display HD. :lol:

Edit gehenna if you can give us a model number of the TV we can do some better comparisons.

not sure of the model sorry, it's not important though, i was more interested in peoples opinions not just a technical comparison, and i think i got what i wanted so thanks guys.