Is it worth paying extra for a Samsung or Toshiba even if we have to go down a size?

I looked pretty closely at a lot of TV's as we've purchased both a 46" LCD and a 40" LCD in the past few months. Both of them are 1080p and both of them are Samsung. The image quality was better to my eye and the contrast ratio was much better (Our 46" has LED backlighting so the contrast ration is 500,000:1, almost as good as high end Plasma TVs). The cheaper 40" is also quite good. I picked up the 40" for $799 during the holidays which for a 1080p Samsung was an amazing deal.

I'd say go with a name brand. The different can be felt in the user interface on screen and in the remote as well as in the level of control that you have over the picture.

Contrast ratio is REALLY important for me because my living room has a lot of glare. (I love my big windows, except when I want to watch TV in the afternoon.)

Hrm. I should probably just get my butt down to J&R next weekend and look at the screens in person.

I also have to figure out if it's worth upgrading our current A/V reciever to one w/HDMI, or just use it for audio and patch the HD video sources into the TV directly. (We have a Harmony remote, so having to switch multiple inputs isn't an issue.)

The AV receiver was the thing that gave me the most headaches when I got my HDTV.

I picked the simplest thing I could find. I ended up with something that was both too powerful for my small apartment (the subwoofer is huge, and I keep it turned way down so as not to annoy my neighbors), and it has too few audio inputs than I might need in the future.

My current one does great for my setup now, and the only difficulty in switching to an HDTV that I can see is it only has one optical audio input, so I'd have to choose between the TV and the DVD player. (I'll also need a new DVD player b/c my current one doesn't upscale, but that's an easy switch.)

Ideally, I'll keep the speakers I have now and just patch them into a new receiver if I do decide to go that route. Otherwise rewiring everything will be kind of a nightmare.

This looks pretty perfect, and the price is right.

Does it have a coax digital audio input? Mine has one of each, so the optical audio comes from the DVD player, and the coax audio comes from the DVR.

Yup - 2 digital optical and 1 digital coax.

There are also a few others at that price point with HDMI passthrough, which might be easier to connect. I'll have to think about it.

If you want to wait to buy the HDTV, and have NetFlix, this could be an interesting choice. No list of price.

Netflix bypasses US mail, set-top box with new HDTVs from LGk

I've seen that announcement a few places - those sets will probably be more $$ than we want to spend. (And since Netflix is also promising Mac-compatible streaming, I can just run a cable from the computer to the TV and achieve the same effect.)

Speaking of which, if I wanted to connect my little aspire one to the tv, can I do it, and how? Would I do the video out that would go to a projector and then a separate thing for sound?