I recently bought a DLP. Or rather my wife did. Gotta love a wife that's more into buying that sort of stuff
I'm a huge Samsung fan, and we were going to go with one of the Samsung models (I think it was the R5067W) because the price was very competitive. But when I took the wife to go buy the one I thought was best, she saw the Toshibas and just had to have one of those despite costing a few hundred more (it was also a couple inches bigger).
I admit, the Toshiba did look better -- they had a much brighter and vibrant picture than the Samsungs, a common complaint with them. But they cost a bit more and I still prefer the Samsung name personally, although the Toshiba has, to-date, performed perfectly. You would do good with either of them.
The only thing that I can say about DLP (and LCDs too) is that you really need to be aware of viewing angles, distances, and ambient light.
If you get too big a TV for your room you have to sit too close and the picture looks grainy. A 50" TV should be about 9 feet away from where you view it for optimal viewing, within 4 feet it'll look pretty bad. And it doesn't take much off-center to have your picture quality go downhill pretty rapidly. Just standing up or sitting on the floor makes a HUGE difference in picture quality. And if the sun is shining on the screen, even through blinds, the TV is extremely washed-out and almost impossible to view.
In the stores, when they put the TVs in those darker areas, the effects of all the above are greatly lessened. Viewing angles and distances aren't affected much when it's dark, but a little ambient light cuts the angle down considerably.
None of the effects are nearly as bad as they were with the old projection TVs. But the effects are far worse than they are with a conventional television and quite a bit worse than they are with Plasma. None of them were bad enough to make me want to return my TV or anything, but they were a lot worse than I expected after viewing them in the stores.
