Originally posted by: Torghn
LCDs:
Better resloutions, higher brightness, longer life
Plasma:
Better color saturation, higher contrast, big screens are cheaper.
Honestly, I don't know why every other comment in this thread concerns the lifespan of plasmas. Right now plasmas have a half-brightness time of somewhere in the neighborhood of 80,000 hours. That means that at 80,000 hours, the image will be half as bright.
I'm not going to go into it in real heavy detail, but if you have a plasma (which I do) and you get it ISF calibrated (which I did), the proper display level has brightness set to somewhere around 1/3 the maximum setting. As the brightness decreases, you incrementally increase your brightness, maintaining proper image brightness and quality, so that by the time you get to 80,000 hours, the image is still as perfect as the day you bought it.
But forget that, did anyone stop to think about how long 80,000 hours is? If you watch the TV every day for 8 hours a day, that's 10,000 days. That's over 27 years. So to address the lifespan issue:
If you watch TV every day for 8 hours a day for 27 years, your plasma will still look just as good as the day you bought it.