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" With football season about to start, Sweetie (the wife) and I decided to upgrade a few of our televisions; Sweetie to follow the Cowboys (she&amp;#039;s from Fort Worth, Texas), and me to stare in horror at the confused expressions of Tom Coughlin coaching the Giants. Most new flat-screens connect to the Internet, download widgets, show your photos, and basically use your TV as a big computer. But my concern is, how&amp;#039;s the picture?  In the case of the new 46-inch LCD SONY BRAVIA KDL-46XBR9 ($2,500; sonystyle.com), it&amp;#039;s excellent. With 1080p resolution and a 240hz refresh rate (the number of times per second the image refreshes up to four times that of most LCD televisions), watching sports is a pleasure, with little to no digital artifacts, even on fast-moving objects like Nascar and Brandon Jacobs, the Giants&amp;#039; back, whom Coughlin will strangely have running on a fourth and 27 from their own five-yard line. The Bravia can display photos and call up widgets that show weather, stocks, and news. You can also stream content from partners like Amazon Video on Demand and Netflix.   Another first-rate monitor is the 50-inch plasma PANASONIC TC-P50V10 ($2,200; panasonic.com). In addition to having picture quality and Internet connectivity comparable to the Sony, the V10 has a slot for your camera&amp;#039;s SD card, so you can pop your vacation photos no one wants to see right into the back of the monitor and show them instantly. Another esoteric option is its ability to connect to the excellent line of Panasonic Web cams. We have one on our deck in Telluride, Colorado, and spend many hours watching the weather from our home in East Hampton, New York, wishing we were there.   Finally, there&amp;#039;s the unusual 46-inch SERIES 8000 FROM SAMSUNG ($3,700; samsung.com). The image is backlit by bright &amp;amp;gt; LEDs. Although this technology allows the screen to be incredibly thin (1.2 inches), it also creates a picture that is surreally sharp and supersaturated, giving it a &amp;quot;video&amp;quot; look. Anything you show on this monitor looks like a video game or a live-news broadcast, which is not necessarily a good thing, especially if you&amp;#039;re watching a movie. The Samsung has an Ethernet port and a USB 2.0 jack, displaying images from any device that connects via USB, from a camcorder to a thumb drive filled with those boring vacation pictures.  If you use a flat-screen mainly for watching movies in a discrete, lighting-controlled environment, I&amp;#039;d go with the Panasonic or Sony. (The differences between plasma and LCD are pretty much a thing of the past.) But if you watch sports with friends in the living room, where your wife won&amp;#039;t let you close the drapes (&amp;quot;Honey, if you want to sit inside on a beautiful day watching Coughlin figure out another way to lose a game, that&amp;#039;s your business, but leave those drapes open&amp;quot;), get the Samsung. Barry Sonnenfeld produced Pushing Daisies and is the director of Get Shorty and Men in Black.  RELATED LINKS:  The Best in Outdoor Home Theaters How to Use the Slingbox and More Devices to Watch TV Remotely One Man Who Isn&amp;#039;t Upset That You Don&amp;#039;t Have the NFL Network  PLUS: Find More Tech Reviews in the &amp;quot;Digital Man&amp;quot; Archive   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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