I worked at bestbuy in home theater.When it comes to lcd as stated its different than dlp dlp looks fine at 60hz lcd is fine at 60hz but 120hz or above is better i never notice anything on any 120hz tv i have seen 240hz is kinda overkill.Plasmas are at 600hz but they need to be so 120hz for lcd is just fine.

Its all frame rates i remember we had these bogus comparisons we would use to try to sell the 240hz it was hillarious

Save a lot of money by buying a 60Hz, I own a Samsung 40" LED-TV with 120Hz, I bought it for about $1400 last December and I regret buying it because 120Hz is absolutely worthless, looks horrible and unnatural on regular video, and you don't want to use it at all on videogames, believe me...

If you want an LED TV I would recommend this one for $1,279.99

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-UN46C5000-46-Inch-1080p-Black/dp/B0036EH17M/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=tv&qid=1271482173&sr=1-2

If you don't care about LED go for a regular LCD like this one for $811.30

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-LN46C530-46-Inch-1080p-Black/dp/B0036EH16S/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=tv&qid=1271482553&sr=1-2

100Hz or 120Hz in your case is fantastic in movies etc as the picture becomes clearer, 200Hz or 240 is not necessary and you won't notice any difference unless the TV is massive, 100 inch or something like that.

Or he could go for 1080p plasma and you got the best of both worlds. Great natural picture with deep blacks and good contrast and good pixel response time...

50 inch 1080p plasma can be found under 1000 bucks

Just go to a tv store and check them out. Look at all the different hz TVs. Buy what you think looks good enough for yourself. Some people that watch my tv find it too smooth and much prefer the slower blurry movie frame rate of 24p.

Panasonic's neo PDP 600hz tv isn't 600 frames per second, Panasonic subdivides their plasma display panels into 10 sub-fields. Each sub-field is refreshed at a 60 Hz rate. 10 sub-fields refreshed at 60 Hz (10 x 60 = 600) produces a 600 Hz sub-field drive figure. It's misleading marketing, nothing to do with framerates.

What he said.

With a few exceptions I have found most games get odd frame studder or dis-colouring.  In short 120 is fine for gaming

apart of the technical apparatus, what about waiting till Christmas and then afford a 3D TV?

If I have the money right now to afford a TV I would save it and wait.

I think many people will be a little pissed of when later this year they discover that their shinny expensive HDTV is outdated and doesn't support 3D content.

And by 3D I'm referring to the auto stereoscopic TV's, that don't require glasses...

1) it depends on the TV. some TVs just flash a bright light to go from 120 to 240. Others actually run at 240 Hz

2) make sure you actually like 120 or 240Hz. I disabled both on my TV for everything (didn't care about the feature, just happened to come with my TV). Go to the store and watch the TV's you are interested in. Play with the settings. You could even go to CNET for some recommended settings for a dark room, but I doubt you'll be viewing the TV in a dark room. No point buying a feature that you can't visually appreciate.

See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine#Telecine_judder It applies to interlaced stuff but gives you an idea of why they are pushing for 120Hz/240Hz TVs.

Most movies are 24FPS so a 240Hz TV can display the same image 10 times 24x10=240Hz so no judder.

A 60Hz TV must display some of the images twice and others only once as 60/24=2.5 which is not a round number, which creates judder as you see some frames for twice as long as others.

This is why they  sell 120/240Hz TV's, because as said above they can display movies with no judder as they don't need to repeat images a varying number of time or to blend them together but repeat each image 5 or 10 times.

More modern TV create intermediate images blending two frames instead of repeating a frame twice. This is not to reduce judder due to frequency mismatch but to reduce judder due to the low frequency of the original material (see here for more info: www.projectorcentral.com/judder_24p.htm).

As you might have noticed it has nothing to do with games.

These TV's AFAIK cannot receive a 240Hz signal. They just process the signal internally at that frequency. You could see this as upscaling the signal except instead of doing it spacially (from SD to HD) they do it temporally (in time, upscaling from 24 frames/seconds to 240 frames/seconds).

Furthermore, as others have noted, many TV's have game mode that disable these kind of processing needed to make movies better looking as they take time to be applied which increase the amount of time between when the TV receives the frame on its input and when it is displayed on the screen. If that time is too high you can notice it (google input lag), though how much lag is too much depends with people.

If you are going to watch a lot of movies on that TV then a 120/240Hz one might be worth it.

If you are going to play mostly games with the odd movie then it would be a waste of money.

As for the judder that you saw in game what were the conditions (hardware, resolution...)? As the only way I can imagine a game looking like it is "juddering" would be if has a serious frame drop so that each frame stays on screen too long. A bit like blinking very fast and continuously while moving/turning your head so you miss some of the "frames" instead of having a continuous vision.

With internet lag you would not have the whole screen juddering but you would see your opponents making quantum leaps (i.e. at one place in one frame and at another place much further the next frame without going through the intervening space) as their position is not refreshed at a high enough frequency due to the lag. 

Hope this helps

I don't like TVs over 32" now. They are way too stretched and make things look nasty. Buy my 42"!