I have an RCA (Thomson) CTC-185A7 19" set, bought new almost six years ago when I moved here. The set has worked just wonderfully all that time, with only a slight problem a few months after purchase (the RF connector for antenna/cable snapped off the tuner PC board). Other than that, the set works extremely well on cable (antennas don't work well in this area
). The auto color circuits work very well also, as I have not had to adjust the onscreen color controls in months. It is for these reasons I intend to keep this set fully as long as it works as well as it does. Digital? Doesn't bother me. I use the set with a cable box now, so if I still have this set when everything goes all-digital, all I'll have to do is call the cable company and have them put in a HD-capable box--if the one I'm using now won't handle the new channels, that is.
I agree with the posters here who have said that plasmas and LCDs, particularly the former, still have bugs which must be worked out. I was particularly interested in one post, in which the writer said some LCDs now are built with some of the video ICs actually incorporated in a cable which requires the entire panel to be replaced if those ICs go bad. The projection lamps in DLPs and other projection HDTV sets are something else yet again. These lamps can open after only a year or two, depending entirely on how much the set is used, and are expensive as all get-out to replace (I saw one for an RCA/Thomson projection set listed for something like $400). Compare this with standard TV CRTs. If you get a good one in a modern analog set, it can last years. (The CRT in my set is the original and still looks as good as the day I purchased the TV; I had a Zenith b&w solid-state 12" portable that was still making a great picture on its original CRT, after 22 years, and I also have a 10-year-old Zenith Sentry 2, original CRT and fantastic picture.)
There are still problems with image burn-in in plasmas. I was browsing ebay earlier this evening and saw a listing for an RCA or Zenith 27" CRT set, in which the seller mentioned the burn-in problem with plasmas and that the CRT set he was selling could last another 25 years without the tube burning out or burning up the screen. Some day, plasma panels will have a similar reliability record (with the panel lasting up to, say, ten years or so; I wouldn't expect a plasma or LCD to last anywhere near 25 years), but the current technology is still new enough that it has bugs in it yet. Perhaps when all TV is digital in 2009 (or whenever; I read recently where some Washington bigwigs are trying to move the deadline up to late 2006 or 2007) this may change for the better, but for the time being we are stuck with what's currently available. Compare today's plasma sets with the first CRT televisions 55+ years ago. Back then, the idea of sending pictures over the air was new, and the technology to receive those images was primitive by today's standards. The same thing can be said for today's plasma/LCD TVs. The technology is still very new and has more than a few bugs (heck, even some TV stations are having problems with their digital signals; for example, several stations in Cleveland are transmitting poor-quality, on-again off-again DTV signals because of problems with the transmitters and so forth), so it is not realistic, IMHO, to come to the conclusion that digital or HDTV has "arrived" yet. Far from it. In five years, maybe, but for now the technology is still evolving, so we have to tolerate the bugs in the current system. Speaking for myself, I won't even think of getting a flat-panel plasma or LCD TV until they work as well as and are as reliable as any good CRT set.