This weekend we stopped by Target to get a few things. This Target has a Best Buy right below it and I figured with time to waste I could spend a few minutes drooling over the many flat panel TV’s they have sitting around. We were not disappointed. While looking around we saw a Maxent 42 inch plasma EDTV for $1,700. I thought for sure it was some sort of typo. Either that or this crazy EDTV was some sort of marketing trick to make people buy the thing. Come to find out EDTV is a stepping stone to HDTV. It supports a higher resolution than standard TV signals and also supports progressive scan DVD’s.

We ended up getting a great deal on the TV and I’m now watching Matrix Revolutions in all of its glory. I’ve finally figured out all of this HDTV crap and I can now recommend to all four of my readers what my take on all of this stuff is.

1. If you are going to buy a flat panel display make sure you buy a plasma and not an LCD display. The plasma displays are, oddly enough, cheaper and have better picture quality than LCD displays.
2. Unless you live in a magical universe where everything is already being broadcast in HDTV there isn’t any reason to buy HDTV. For the most part your shiney HDTV will be running in EDTV mode anyways so you might as well save a buttload of cash and buy an EDTV display.
3. Make sure you get the service plan. I know, I know, they always sound like a line of crap, but LCD/plasma displays suffer from something called “dead pixels” and the service plan states if you get three dead pixels you get a new TV. This is definitely worth the money.

What I found most amazing was that the clerk at Best Buy was willing to haggle over the pricing. If we had bought the display, paid taxes and bought the service plan all at retail we would have spent about $2,250 on our TV. In reality, we only paid $1,900. To say your DVD’s have never looked this good would be a huge understatement. I’m super impressed thus far. Now I just need to get a HDTV compliant TiVo box.