Wow, I thought it wa sjust me and Goldie who knew a thing or two about the AV industry...
I'll pretty much echo what others have said, and aelaberate a touch on the 100hz/200hz thing.
Avoid expensive cables, I use HDMI cables from WES that cost me about $15 for a 2m cable. I've installed 3tv's this weekend, and have yet to have a single one fail or ruin picture quality, and I've put up at least 50 screens this year. alone. I find well priced cables of reasonable quality can often be found at computer shops. in Sydney anyway.
I have heard that "Cablechick" is a good online retailer of well priced cables. Never tried them myself though, as I have my own sources within the industry. Also, make sure the cable is long enough. The number of times I have walked into a job where the client "had everything", and the Harvey Norman sales guy sold him a 1m Monster cable for what is a 3m run... Measure the length from tv to equipment, then double it. You should be safe
3 - 5m cables are the go for wall mounted screens, 2 meters for the screen on a desk top with equipment underneath, and a meter if the component is sitting on the same surface as the TV.
100hz/200hz - this is basically refers to how many times the screen is refreshed every second.. There really is very little that can be seen by the human eye between the two, so don't insist on 200hz,
These high scan rates are usually used in conjunction with some sort of frame interpolation system, "smooth motion" or "motionflow", these give you a picture that looks very crisp and smooth, but at the same time, un-natural. When you watch a movie with such a system turned on, it often looks like it was shot with a handycam. Some people (usually those with very little clue) think this makes for a better picutre. Personally, I'm a bit of a purist, I want the movie experience in my home to be as close as possible to the cinema.
If you have ever seen the raw footage of a movie (usually seen in "making of" sections of special features in DVD's and Blu-Rays), you'll notice the footage looks remarkebly like high quality handy cam footage. Very different to what you see as an end result. This is because movie houses actually pay highly trained people lots of money to put in motion blur,colour and contrast adjustments, even grain, to achieve the look the movie maker wants.
The motionflow systems effectively remove some of this stuff, by adding in frames that did not exist. EG, a movie plays back at about 25 (for simplicity) frames per second in a cinema, when you have a 100hz tv with a smooth motion system turnbed on, it "makes up" 3 of every 4 frames. The result is a smooth picture, at the cost of some of the "cinema look".
I'm not totally against such systems, I think they are cool for sports, and even cartoons, but I'd turn them off for movies and video games (the processing time causes a slight lag for video games).
In terms of which TV - I'd skip over LG. My picks for LCD would be either Samsung or Sony. For plasma, Panasonic, and the 8 series Samsung looked pretty good too, though not sure of the pricing. I tend to put "ease of use" as part of the TV watching experience, but no one really offers a proper remote anymore (with discrete buttons for inputs) though Sony and Samsung to make it easy enough to be able to remove inputs you are not using, this limiting the amount of button pressing between inputs. LG are fine int his regard, I just see more LG's getting waranty repairs than the others. I'd rather spend an extra $100 and have a lower chance of a warranty issue.
*wonders in amazement at how much crap he can dribble whilst sipping a latte at Mecca*
If you have any more questions on specific models, let me know.
Cheers,
Z...
