I have a 43 inch Samsung plasma 3D 1080p, 600hz . No complaints at all. The only plastic on the thing is the front rim. But other besides that, all metal and glass. Very well built, and the deepest blacks your going to find outside of an OLED. Plasma TV's have come along way. Buy one your won't regret it.

Take a gamble and try good 'ol ebay I guess.

I would go for 3, I think you'll have to wait quite a few years for a significant improvement over the highend TVs today (in the same price range)

Thanks for the help everyone. I'm considering going for that 51" plasma, but I'd like to know how works with 3D through the PC. Does it work with Nvidia's 3D solution?

Yes it does in the form of 3D TV Play(not 3D Vision).

http://www.nvidia.com/object/3dtv-play-system-requirements.html

 However it only works with HDMI 1.4 720p for gaming. This is a blessing and a curse...

Blessing cause you can use a GTX 550-560 and still play games in 3D with decent frame rate.

Curse cause you're getting image scaling (720p plastered on to 1080p screen).

Nvidia forums are really pissed cause they won't enable side by side support for these TV's in the driver.  Side by side is still 720p amount of pixels, but its interlaced hence pixels are mapped 1:1 on the TV which produces a better image.

Best solution is checkerboard which has been supported since 2007 and is still the best 3D quality you can experience with an HDMI connection. However only HDMI 1.4 TVs to support checkerboard are 2010 Samsung plasmas. 2011 and up, no one but mitsubishi DLPs use checkerboard.

Yeah, 720p is a given. But that would be another good reason to upgrade somewhere down the line.

If I go for something a bit higher than a GTX 560, covering the jaggies with some AA will probably be enough for me for a good while.

By the way d21lewis, if you still want a 42" TV, the Panasonic P42GT30 should be an excellent choice as well.

The Samsung D8000-series LED TV has the best picture quality I have ever seen, even better than plasmas.

I got a 50 inch LG Plasma TV (Can't remember the exact model) about 2 years ago. I don't primarily use it for gaming, but whenever I play on it, it has this 1/2 second input lag between the controller and whats on screen. This lag can be really detrimental in fighting and FPS games online. I tried all sorts of tweaking with the options but nothing ever worked.

So I don't know this might be something to watch out for, maybe try the tv at a showroom before buying.

Honestly I would say now isn't a particularly good time to buy a 3D TV. Some people might disagree with me but I still think most 3D TVs are at the point where they are still new and not as good or cheap as they should be. I expect that within a couple of years at most we will start seeing vast improvements in them that make current sets feel quite outdated.

If you buy a 3D TV now there is a pretty fair chance that it will seem quite outdated very shortly. Whether it's improvements in the 3D tech, improved and mass market glass less 3d etc. I think 3D TVs still aren't really at the point of being relatively stable in the quality.

Especially considering some companies are now pushing out 4k Tvs so we may start to see 1080p TVs drop in price quite sharply.