What is the best 52" plasma tv for overall picture quality?

the first three Answers made me laugh i think Panasonic and Pioneer are among the best brands do allot of research www.cnet.com and www.avsforum.com is a good place to start

LG ToSHIBA

I have been in the business for years and I would go with Plasma over LCD. Plasma screens DON'T leak gas. They are NOT more expensive than LCD. They do NOT give a worse picture. LCDs are a bit more expensive that Plasmas (when you are talking about similar quality products), but they last longer. I call that a draw. You have three quantifiers with plasma TVs. You have GOOD, GREAT, and JUNK. Great plasmas are Fujitsu, Pioneer ELITE. Louve used to be a great brand, until they sold out the line to someone and disappeared. Marantz and Hitachi are also very close. Good plasmas are pretty much anything else with a brand name that you have heard of connected with televisions. Samsung, Zenith, LG, Panasonic, Toshiba, Pioneer, Sony, RCA, Mitsubishi, and more. Sony is the same stuff as Samsung or Zenith, they just put a nicer package on it and charge twice the money. Junk plasmas are brands like GE, Westinghouse, AKAI, Sampo, Sanyo, Viewsonic, Haier. These all seem to come from one plant in Taiwan that essentially buys all of the old manufacturing equipment from the Japanese and Korean outfits and cobbles it together three years after it was state of the art, and they use that to make the "junk" plasmas.

If u want to go for best Quality i.e. SONY, and also for good quality with reasonable price u can go for Philips.

Don't buy a plasma TV - the gas leaks out and the picture quality deteriorates over time. I actually heard a salesperson say that he wondered why anyone would buy a plasma TV - better to get a smaller LCD television - the prices are dropping all the time and the picture quality is improving.

Then don't buy a Pazma - go LCD instead for several reasons. 1. LCD is cheaper. 2. LCD uses less power. 3. LCD gives off much less heat than Plazma. 4. Brands like SONY eclipse the best plazma TVs I have seen.

I wouldn't get a plasma. Recent enlightment on them shows the screens don't last and the plasma crystals also tend to "fall" leaving a white streak down the screen which is what happened to a friend's tv after only a few months! Also the screens tend to get "burned" with images that are regularly on the screen. LCD is the way to go.