Contrast ratio is the difference in brightness between blacks and whites. For example, 500:1 is staying that Whites are 500 times brighter than Blacks. What does this means in layman terms?
This means bright whites, darker blacks and everything in-between is more vibrant and accurate.
Higher the contrast ratio, the better the colors you will have on your image. This spec is unrelated to clarity, resolution and refresh rate. It is specifically telling you about color quality.
Picture refresh rate would be response time. You will see the term in ms. 30ms is slow. Good LCD response time is under 10ms. Excellent is under 5ms.
doing more investigation:
looking more at TV's, had a look at the samsung 6 series, ben suggested I do this. To me, comparing the two tv's, panasonic and samsung, the panasonic looks much better. The samsung had just a little bit of edging around the presenters on the tv. The sources were a little bit different.
funny thing: I keep going back to the panasonic. Need to look some more and wait for a good deal.
last night, did some reading on how light may affect plasma tv's. Basically it said, lcd tv's are much better in lighter conditions than plasmas. Need to do some more investigation.
Resolution can be seen in computer or video terms. Computer terms would be two values, such as 1920x1080. Video terms would be 480p, 720p, 1080p. The correlation between the two types of terms is the last value. 1920x1080 is the same as 1080p. 1280x720 is the same as 720p.
