Looking for a good mid-sized tv

[Parrish]

So I'm finally going to bite the bullet and ditch my ancient 19 inch Sharp tube and I'm looking for a new mid-size second tv (which seems to be mostly in the 37-42 inch range these days). It's going to be in a pretty brightly lit room with most of the viewing being standard def material over a media extender, but some HD via antenna and an HD-DVD player.

 

Anyone with any recent purchases/experiences/recommendations? Price isn't my biggest concern, but bang-for-my-buck is - I want to get something that's going to last a while.

[Robot Monkey]

I'm pretty happy with my 37" Vizio -- once I turned off the annoying backlight.

[JoeyN]

In that range, as Jay mentioned the Vizio's give the most bang for your buck. I can't believe how cheap there smaller LCD sets are. I paid like $1350 for my 26 inch samsung LCD a few years ago. The Vizio is like half that

[Solitice]

Make sure you look at a Pioneer Kuro 42". As an ISF calibrator I'd actually suggest looking at the Pioneer Elite because it has the best gray scale tools in the market right now with a whopping 10 step gray scale adjustment (most only have 2). The other advantages that it has is a much lower power consumption, a greatly reduced burn in time of about 500hrs compared to the normal 2000+ hours (time it takes for the panel degrade curve to smooth out to almost flat) and black levels that kick the living snot out of anyone else. Every time I calibrate one of these sets I am completely taken on how damn good I can make them look.

 

Oh, I forgot to mention that the elite models also let you stream media via a network connection.

[GreenMonkey]

We haven't had any real complaints with our Olevia 37" I bought last January for ~$630. It runs practically 12 hours a day while the wife and kids are at home.