Which video card for a gaming laptop monitor?

When pairing a Monitor with a laptop, what are the biggest determining factors of the picture quality? I have a 54" Panasonic Plasma screen TV and I was looking at buying a gaming laptop for when Diablo 3 comes out. I think it would be awesome to use that TV as my monitor, but beyond video, my understanding is the system requirements should be minimal for the game.

So, if I buy a underwhelming system just to run the game (i.e. not the top of the line, but enough for the relatively low system requirements) what do I need to look at spending my money on to make the game look crisp on such a big 1080p TV? Specifically, what aspects of video cards do I need to look at? I'm not worried about specific models of cards, mainly because I don't plan on doing this at least until there is a release date for the game. But what numbers mean the most when trying to get really good picture?

 

The image won't look any different. The main differences will be in performance, i.e. you'll get more frames per second with a high end card than a midrange or low end card, but the actual image you see on the screen (at the same settings and resolution) will not look any different.

I'd say to be on the safe side, look for something with a Core i7 or i5 CPU, or maybe a higher-clocked Core 2 Duo, and a decent graphics card, something like a GT 240M from nVidia, or Mobility Radeon HD 5650 from ATi.

 

I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to achieve.

If you're talking about colour, sharpness etc, those are all adjusted through the menus in the screen.

If you want a game to look good, you need a higher resolution and a more powerful card, otherwise it will look like a blurry mess. You don't need to look at the 'numbers' (e.g. Clocks), just benchmarks, to see which ones are better. But, with a good graphics card, you'll need good RAM and a good CPU, which means the price rises higher than you want to pay.