You sometimes hear that bigger isn’t necessarily better. But in our experience, you know who’s likeliest to say so? Puny, petulant little pee-wees who wish, like young Josh before Zoltar, they were big.

Now you, on the other hand—you know better. You know BIGGER. Big Boy, Big Macs, Big Gulps, “Big Bad John,” Jimmy Dean’s classic country ballad of mineshaft heroism—these are a few of your favorite things. You don’t want to waste your time with a less-than-gigantic plasma screen, even if you’ve got a less-than-gigantic budget.

Settle for smallness no more, little big man! This Sanyo is pretty much the cheapest 42-inch HD ready plasma screen you’ll find anywhere. It’s 42 inches! Imagine that: if a football field were one inch long, it would take over 40 of them, laid end to end, to reach from one corner of this bad boy to its diagonal opposite. It displays HD content at up to an eye-popping 1080 lines interlaced or 720 lines progressive. And while you’re sitting there, thinking about how to shoehorn it into your holiday spending plan, wondering which of your least-loved relatives to drop from your shopping list, remember: like everything in woot’s magical workshop, this monitor ships to your door for just five measly bucks.

You want specifications? Allow us to specify: This monitor offers a contrast ratio of 1000:1 and overall brightness rated at 1100 cd/m2. It displays a full 1024×1024 image, boasts 3D chrominance luminance separation and digital progressive scanning to further enhance its extraordinary picture performance. It’s got over a million active picture elements for amazing detail and color variation the likes of which was impossible just a few short years ago.

Put it anywhere you like; it performs like a champ in a wide range of room settings. Its unusually broad viewing angle means you see a clear, undistorted image wherever you sit. And an innovative Dynamic AI circuit constantly monitors different picture performance parameters like the most dedicated nerd to have a work-study assignment in the media lab, making automatic adjustments for factors like ambient lighting and white balance, and keeping image quality at its optimum.

Note that this is only a HD monitor. No speakers are included (though it does have amplifiers for speakers), nor any HD tuner. That means you’re going to need your own HD source—HD cable, HD satellite, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, whatever. And you'll have to get your own table stand or wall mount. And don’t be thrown by the funky-seeming 1024×1024 ALiS panel resolution, there'll be plenty of discussion on ALiS (alternate lighting of surfaces) technology in the forum.

What’s this? You’re hesitating? You’re starting to weigh pettier concerns, like rent, groceries, a plane ticket home for the holidays? You’re thinking small, man! Look at the big picture!

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