What is your budget for this new tv?

I've had a hd ready tv for over two years now. It is a 42" toshiba rear-projection tv (rptv). I love the hd picture, but imo all crt based rptvs are too much work. Out of the box, all crt rptv will require lots of tweaking to look good. My biggest complaint is the convergence which needs to be touched up periodically. It does have an auto converge feature, but it doesn't work very well (none of them do). Toshiba's of my vintage also have lots of interesting video problems (mostly ghosts).

If I had to buy a crt rptv it would probably be a hitachi. Both the tosh's and hitachi have really good strech modes, which is important because all sd material is 4x3. Just realize that all tvs have issues, you need to find the one with issues that bother you the least. []

If I were to buy another hd tv today, it would probably be either a sony gw3 or a sammy dlp set.

Read as much as you can for each set at the spot. I think they have the best source of rptv info on the web (but you need to pay for it).

I also bought mine online and would do it again in a heartbeat. Don't feel you have to buy it in a store because of the size.

edit:

whatever you buy, make sure it has a dvi input!