I just purchased
this Samsung. ($1450 at Circuit City)
It's 32", and got excellent user reviews on CNET. It has a vga connector so you can hook it to the PC for cheap with a ten foot female/female vga cable. (A PC LCD connector to HDMI tv input cable will run you about $80)
The res is 1358x768. This is less than the full HD res, but as I found almost EVERY set out there right now does not support full HD. They're only JUST starting to come out with "full hd" sets that can do 1920x1080. And those ones are beyond your price range and only available in 40" or higher models from what I saw.
I had purchased a 40" Sharp but found it to be too large, especially when viewing most low res regular TV, and lacking in the area of reproducing dark colors.
I looked at a lot of reviews and user opinions, and as you can see from that site most users are happy with the Samesung. It does as good a job as you're likely to get out of an LCD reproducing dark colors smoothly. There will be a little banding in very dark areas, but I was unable to find an LCD after looking for hours over the course of several days at all the various models that didn't have any banding at all. I originally grabbed the Sharp on a whim based on the fact that when looking at it in the showroom the colors looked the best, but I didn't examine it closely enough because while that was true with bright colors, it was terrible at reproducing the dark tones.
The only bad things I have to say about the TV is that Sharp's remote design and menu interface were way better, and the Sharp TV could be set to stay warmed up when off so that it would come on instantly.
But the sharp couldn't even pivot left and right. This Samsung can.
Now, if you do decide to get the Samsung you'll want to fiddle with the settings to get a picture which looks good with regular TV and DVD's and keeps banding to a minimum. Out of the box the settings aren't the best they could be, particularly for CG movies. I spent an hour or so playing with the settings and testing them on regular TV shows and various scenes from Shrek 2, and I can let you know what settings will give you a picture which is good and not so bright that you'll be blinded if you watch at night at all, and where everything will be washed out.
Another thing to consider is lag time. Some HDTV's will have lag when you play a game on them. This is due to the tv electronics being slow when scaling the pciture up or down. This Samsung has a game mode. I don't know if the game most actually speeds up the response time, but it does make the screen a little darker, presumably because games are very bright. You can adjust you brightness to compensate for this. But anyway I tried counterstrike on it with the VGA input and it seemed not to have any lag in whatever mode I was in when I would fire.
And one last thing. The picture when I hooked up my VGA connector was initially quite obvuiously scaled in some way, cause sharp vertical lines were antialised. But if windows doesn't detect the TV settings properly, you can go under the advanced tab in windows and set the front and back porch to positive or whatever, and set the hz to match what it says in the TV's manual, and then change res and go back to the real res and from then on the picture will be as sharp as a tack. But really bright! Maybe I DIDN'T have the game mode on when I was using it. Anyway you can turn down the brightness easily enough. The settings will be seperate from the main settings for the VGA connector I think.
As for home theatres, I have nothing to reccomend. I have one, but I don't know how much it cost. It came from Cambridge Soundworks. I also have not compared it to any others. So I have no idea. Your best best would be to find an audiophile review site where they tested their abilities out in great detail.