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I've been watching 720P LCD's at my Mother's house and a 720P projector at my place for the last several years. Earlier this year I picked up a 1080P LCD. It really does have to do with the distance you sit from your set. My Mom has a 32" Sony 720P set. It was pretty much top of the line 2 or 3 years ago. She sits about 13 feet away from it and says she can't tell the difference between SD and HD. Well at 13 feet I have trouble too some times. At my place I sit about 9 feet away from a 46" 1080P Mitsubishi set, and it looks phenomenal. It definitely blows away any 720P set I've watched, including my brother's 720P plasma. That said, I have an open floor plan with my kitchen, dining room, and living room all sharing the same space. It's about 30'X20'. When I'm not sitting in the living room, my eyes aren't good enough to see how good the 1080P screen is.

Crutchfield has a great chart in their catalogs and probably their web site too with recommended screen sizes for seating distances. If the set you're looking to buy isn't as large as they state for your seating distance then you probably aren't going to gain anything with 1080P. If you can afford the larger set however, 1080P is the way to go. Incidentally, the sets on display at the big box stores are rarely set up properly. They're usually splitting the same signal 20 or 30 times, usually a pizza dish signal at that, making the picture look like crap on every set in the store. The only exception is when they have a BD or HDDVD deck connected directly to a set.

iammike said:

Incidentally, the sets on display at the big box stores are rarely set up properly. They're usually splitting the same signal 20 or 30 times, usually a pizza dish signal at that, making the picture look like crap on every set in the store. The only exception is when they have a BD or HDDVD deck connected directly to a set.

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If you're splitting a digital signal multiple times, the degradation goes like this: "Great, great, great, gone". It's not like splitting an analog signal where it goes: "Great, good, fair, poor". With a digital signal you may see some breakup right before "gone", but that point is so close to gone that you would consider it gone anyway.

The showroom TVs may not be set up correctly as you said, but splitting the digital signal is not a part of that.

Most of the big box stores now use ATSC transmissions to distribute the signal to all the TVs. It has helped a lot.

I've seen component connections, running to some box I think is more than just a splitter.

While searching for something else, I run across this post on AVS from over a year ago
720 vs. 1080 and networks - AVS Forum

It looks at the 1080 vs. 720 issue from a different angle: not what a human eye can resolve and from what distance but what effective resolution a modern motion picture carries (resolvable video equivalent). From this post (and links within it) it looks like 1280 vertical lines (i.e. the 720 high definition standard) is more than enough to show everything (frequency-wise) a modern picture has.

Says Joe Kane

Horizontal resolution of most film masters in 1080p is in the area of 800 to 1300 lines. The horizontal capability of 720p is 1280 lines, the top end of what's on the 1080p master.

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Interesting read.

Diogen.

I agree about display device quality.

If you ask people on avs whether you should go with a 720p Kuro or a 1080p Samsung/Panny plasma, most say Pioneer. I agree, especially at 50".