Differences between consumer and professional plasmas?

[sokrman14]

I have been looking at some plasmas, and was curious if the video processors in a professional plasma will be as good as those in a consumer plasma. I know they are supposed to be used for different reasons, but the prices on a professional plasma seem to be more reasonable. I'm looking at panasonics by the way. Also If anyone knows any differences between the Pioneer Elite 43" and the Hitachi 42HDS52 plasmas I would love to hear it. Is one better than the other?

[BMXTRIX]

Pioneer Elite, in my experience, are the best line of plasmas manufactured. All around, they are king.

Pro plasmas often lack a lot more than people realize, especially from Panasonic.

The 8UK, I believe, doesn't have HDMI, no ATSC or NTSC tuners, no internal cablecard, one set of component inputs, no speakers. If you just want a plasma to hang on the wall and use without a lot of necessary external equipment, than the 8uk pro line is not the way to go.

As well, I have seen the pro line listing less color capabilities (2 million colors vs. 8 million?) than the consumer line. This indicates that the consumer line has better video handling capabilities than the pro line.

I personally have been opting for the consumer lines as you can just put them on your wall, run cable into them, throw a cablecard in and enjoy a couple hundred channels with nothing else necessary. Very cool.

The pro line works great though if you always plan to use your external speakers, have an external cable/sat box, are using an A/V receiver, and pay a bit more to add the HDMI card to the display. It can save a few hundred bucks overall. But, I'm not sure of the color handling/graphics difference.

[DougRuss]

You might find the following info at this Link Helpful ?

http://www.glaucobruzzi.com/plasma-faq/index.php?