Nick...
The Mitsubishi WS-65315 is a 65" ($2300.00 on
www.bestbuy.com) CRT with 1200 lines of potential horizontal resolution. Generally speaking, a good CRT always produces a better image than a Plasma, LCD, DLP, or anything else. Blacks that are black, and colors that are accurate. There is so much technology in CRTs that makes it better you would be amazed.
There are a few drawbacks with CRT though:
1. They aren't as bright. To overcome this they use screens that help to focus the light on a given seating position. You must be within the range of their 'sweet area' to have a bright image. This is something that DLP and LCD don't deal with as much because they are brighter, but still DLP & LCD do this as well.
2. CRT needs to be converged regularly. About once every few months you should get into the setup menu and align Red, Green, and Blue on top of each other exactly to provide the best possible image. Most projectors should walk you through exactly how to do this. I haven't used one in a while, so there may be newer ways to deal with projector convergence.
But, a 65" screen will be pretty exciting and definitely provides the most resolution and bang for your buck. The single biggest reason not to buy a rear projection CRT is that they are extremely large and heavy. That's about it, unless brightness is a major issue to you.
If brightness is a major issue - go plasma or LCD flat panel display. Nothing is brighter.
Now the Sony rear projection LCD, model KF50WE610 has a price on Best Buy of $2,600.00. This unit provides you with 1386 X 788 resolution which allows it to be labelled as an HDTV. This unit seems to be exactly what you want, but there is no way in the world that it will provide as good of an image as the Mitsubishi listed above. It will be a cool looking Sony though.
