Heres my 2...
1. Use a credit card that doubles the manufacturers warranty. The base warranty on decent plasmas really should be one and one, not 90 days and one.
2. Bad Pixels on Plasmas are usually bad from the git go' pixels almost never go bad during the life of a plasma; its an upfront QA issue with plasmas.
3. To address the post with all the plasma failures up there- I Believe it. All the way. All of those brands, especially and including NEC, have failure rates above Panasonic, Fujitsu, and Hitachi. Pioneer makes a great display, but is EXTREMELY difficult to deal with when something goes wrong. Thats because they are loosing money on plasma despite in general having a GREAT product-- if you get one without faults. Check out there dead pixel return policy. Holy smokes. Samsung has gotten better by the way, put a couple years back they had big time QA problems.
4. Some folks get the warranty for piece of mind and are good with that. Some dont. Me? I Didnt. I had two years with the credit card. I have had the Panasonic plasma for three years ( plus) with no problems yet.
5. And yes- Panny is releasing a torrential flood of stuff over the coming months, although I am not sure how much downward pressure on pricing will occur. Expect about 5500 for the 58 inch commerical display and maybe 7500 for the commerical 65 inch 1080P display. A rough guess with minimal inside information other than the whispers about the 65 ich 1080P consumer model goin for 9 grand msrp. Commerical at 1500 less is reasonable and consistent with hisorical pricing patterns.
