re: best Buy deal: 55" RCA LED HDTV for $499

Every TV can benefit from turning off all the optional signal manipulations, like Digital NR. Also, if the set has it available, grey scale calibration and color calibration should be done. Don't try this yourself unless you have a really good eye for color. Gray calibration is hugely important.

Where most people fail is using sharpness and contrast too much. All of that is only artificial information. It can add noise in the image.

Also, the best thing to visually calibrate to is a nice up-close face, like this:



Unfortunately, all LED's, regardless of whether it is backlit or side lit, suffer from inability to resolve black very well. On a plasma (rest in peace) and CRTs (also, rest in peace), you could create almost absolute blacks, with very fine variations leading up to dark grey. It created images with superb detail, great color saturation without looking cartoonish and a very deep field of depth.

LED will never achieve that level of realism. Although it can achieve great crispness of detail, it can't create the extraordinary detail in fine delineations of color and black/greys that those other technologies could.

The trade off? Inexpensive options. They run cooler. They use a lot less energy.

However..... technology is rapidly transforming the landscape. Faster processing, newer LED manufactuing and soon, OLED displays. The price of these sets today, are really incredibly cheap for what you get.