[Robert Grant]

Forgive me for being "off topic" for the category, whilst being "on topic" to the question:

Panasonic CT-34WX54J (2004)

I had only bought this a few hours earlier. It had been in a flea market for quite awhile, and I had always been on the fence about buying it (less about the price than about the floor space and the 160 Lb. weight of it), I finally used a little bit of my "Christmas money" (I paid about 1/15th of it's price when new).

I would otherwise not even think of adding a set so recent to my "collection", as I really like pre-1970 sets, but this set is "early" in some other aspects (no pun intended). This is both my first set with a 16:9 CRT and my first with HD scan rate capability (if one does not count computer monitors). It has one foot in the CRT age, and the other foot in the HDTV age, and they were not making sets like this for very long, before Plasma and LCD sets became affordable, ending the need for sets like this. What electrostatic 7" sets were to monochome TV, and sets like the RCA CTCs 4 through 11 to the color TV era, this set, in the future, will be an "early" set in the HDTV era.

Well, the picture and color gamut are downright brilliant, and the sound is awesome. It has inputs aplenty, and, from what I read, it has PIP (first set with this I've ever had).

Main disadvantage is that it does not have an ATSC tuner (so I used one of my RCA ATSC-11s). The aperture grille is not fine enough to carry the full horizontal resolution of the 1080i picture (though to be sure it is easily sharper than any 480i CRT)