Y'all are forgetting... this is my Dad's TV that HE will be buying. Retired, grumpy, brewing coffee at 10:00pm type of dad.
Story: We had a 27" Hitachi console TV when I was a teen. Somebody spilled a glass of iced tea on top and knocked out the top 20% of the picture. He didn't care, the old man watched it that way for years until I finally got a job and bought him a 30" Toshiba.
He's not real particular when it when it comes to PQ or fashion - any HD big screen will knock his socks off, probably. My only concern was whether those two that he was looking at had obvious flaws (built-in obsolescence, history of problems, over-priced, etc...). I looked around and told him to buy the 51" Magnavox for $600 less, but it doesn't have a DVI input (whatever that is) and it has only one set of HD inputs. No way on the plasma.
