Clearly embedded somewhere in America's national psyche is an obsession with getting thin. How else do you explain both the celebrity of Nicole Richie and the craze for flat-panel TVs? In fact, with the increased focus on TVs slim enough to be mounted on a wall, the environment for rear-projection HDTVs has gotten a lot tougher.
Do you need 1080p in a 42-inch flat panel? This is an important question, especially for plasma manufacturers that fear losing customers to the LCD camp at this highly coveted screen size. Up until now, plasma technology's cell structure has made it difficult to fit 1,920 by 1,080 pixels into a 42-inch screen size, which seems to have put them at a competitive disadvantage. As I write this, the first true 1080p 42-inch plasma (a Panasonic) is about to hit the shelves at a price of $2,500, but the market is already littered with 42-inch 1080p LCDs priced under $2,000. If consumers believe that they must have 1080p right now, it's fairly obvious which route they'll go.
