If you're looking at the Sony XBR rear projection have a look at the JVC line too as they're about the same size just 20-30% less expensive.
You're looking at three different technologies ya' know?
Do not read on - SPOILERS - if you still want to belive in the Easter Bunny stop reading!
The XBR1 is a liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) which is the type I bought but from JVC. The LCoS is similar to LCD projection but it lacks the spinning color wheel of the LCD projector - one less moving part. It also has "softer" pixels meaning that the screen door effect (SDE) is very minimum. If you're too close to an LCD you'll see the small gaps between pixels. Some people don't like the softer film-like appearance of the LCoS - I do. All projectors can suffer from the Shimmering Screen Effect (SSE) where if you focus on the screen - like during a bright white scene - you'll see the screen glowing and shimmering with a light of its own.
Plasmas are much better today than they were even three years ago but they still do suffer image burn-in. This becomes a problem if you're game has a bright white score board or other stationary image. When you quit the game the ghost of the score board will carry over into your television and movie watching ... for how long depends. The sets at work it's forever. The plasmas also suffer from something called clay face - where the colors and tones that should be continous are all one tone like the person's face was made of one color bar of clay vice contionus skin tones.
Lots of issues seen on HDTV's are the results of watching standard definition programming at the higher resolution exposing all the flaws of the original source. MPEG compression also add tons of artifacts which I'll not expose here <g>.
