At 46 inches, the Samsung LT-P468W LCD panel has bragging rights as the biggest LCD currently shipping, and it's the only display in this roundup that supports 1080p. Without it, you have to go to the very rare and expensive 70-inch plasma to hit 1080p.

This Samsung panel is very PC-friendly, offering both DVI and VGA connectors to display your PC's GUI in all its 1,920-by-1,080 glory. With a native HDMI port, it's ready for the current and next generation of set-top boxes, DVD players, and other high-definition sources. The finishing touch is an optical S/PDIF output to forward a digital audio bitstream that accompanies an HDTV transmission to your home theater receiver.

The LT-P468W offers versatile I/O connectivity, though most of the connectors stick out of the back panel—inconvenient if you're thinking of hanging it on the wall (though its 99-pound weight renders that unlikely). Side connectors for composite and S-Video, as well as stereo audio, allow fast hookups of your camcorder.

The menu systems are straightforward, and we were able to give each input a custom name. The inputs could remember custom settings—a key feature for an HDTV that's acting as AV hub in a home theater system. The remote does lack discrete input selector buttons, however, and you must cycle through the inputs to get to the one you want.

The LT-P468W is very bright and displays vivid colors, sometimes too vivid. Reds in particular are vibrant and full of life, but the panel appeared to be overdriving its red levels at times. Flesh tones suffer from a "too much rouge" effect. As it turns out, the Color control lets you dial back some of the excessive redness, though flesh tones then became somewhat greenish. In darker scenes from several DVD movies, much detail was lost, and dark colors rolled off to black too soon to render details truly.

A big, bright LCD panel, the Samsung LT-P468W has the only true 1080p display in this roundup. It delivers very good image quality in bright scenes, but its dark-scene performance doesn't fare as well. That, plus the availability of similar-size HD plasma panels for less money, keeps this Samsung out of the winner's circle.