I'm really interested in buying this unit, but I'm really confused now. I always thought that this unit can display a 1080i signal (ps3, etc) but not a 1080p.

But on the panasonic site and here people keep mentioning that this is a 720p TV. Can someone please explain to me if this TV can display 1080i?

To be clear, as I understand a 1080p unit can display all video sources (480, 720, 1080i, 1080p)

and a 720p like the px80 can display (480, 720, 1080i)? or does it only display 480 and 720?

Didn't you ask this in another thread already? The resolution advertised is based on the actual physical resolution of the display panel, NOT by what sources it can display. A 1080p display has 1920x1080 pixels. A 720p display has,... well here it gets a little confusing. A "720p" display should have 1280x720 pixels, but when it comes to plasma televisions, most are actually 1366x768 pixels, since (I think) this is a standard computer resolution. The PX80 is one of these: technically it should be called a "768p" set since that is the actual resolution, but for some reason these 768p sets are called "720p" to distinguish themselves from the "Full HD" 1080p TV's.

Again, the important thing is that the advertised resolution is based on the number of pixels the set has, not by the resolution of the signals it can accept. A "720p" TV like the PX80 can accept 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p signals, and it will scale ALL of them to fit it's actual 768p resolution.

I'd add to that that if you give the TV a 1080i or p source, it should in theory display sharper than a 720p source since it doesn't have to scale the picture up and you'll be using the full 768p resolution. A 720p signal fed to a 768p display actually displays an effectively much lower resolution than 720p since most of the pixels will need to be blended across many pixels. Not going to get into burn-in issues, but if you're going to hook your computer up to any display for use as a HTPC, you'll get much, much better results for text if the TV can take it's native panel resolution as input. That means either checking that the TV can take 1366x768 or just get a 1080p display since 1080p panels have the same physical resolution as the input signal. My Panasonic projector has a true 720p display and crisp text. I briefly had a Samsung 4271 1080p LCD (returned it due to flicker now looking at getting a Panasonic Plasma). Both are great for watching streamed movies from Netflix and the text for general Windows usability is as clear as a computer monitor.

Thanks for the info guys. So, basically whatever source I use w/ this TV the signal will be bumped up or down to 720p right? That sucks, because I thought that this TV can do 1080i not p. I really want to take advantage of blu ray and games being displayed in 1080.

This changes everything, or am I over reacting?

Well, I think that, yes, you may be overreacting a bit. A 720p display will still look absolutely stunning, given a good source (720p, 1080i, or 1080p.) The conventional wisdom is that once you get beyond 6-8 feet or so away from the TV you won't be able to tell the difference, because there's a physical limit to what detail your eyeball can resolve. (These details are a matter of continuous debate here.)

But if you are concerned about getting the most out of your purchase and you don't ever want to second-guess your decision, you may well want to choose a 1080p set, at a slight cost premium over the 720p sets.

Actually whatever you give your display will be bumped up or down to 768p, the native resolution of the panel. As slbosse said, for most movies and regular content, the difference might not be perceptible to you. Personally, I got laser eye surgery and now see 20/15 in both eyes, and there's no way I'm ever going 720 again. I want to see every bit of detail that's available in my hi-def content. For games, it probably won't matter too much because current generation systems (Xbox 360 and PS3) render at 720p and the developers expect that people will have all kinds of different TVs, and most won't be 1:1 pixel matched.

I totally agree with slbosse that you should get a 1080p if you don't want to have any regrets about it. Streaming media is becoming more common and if you ever do decide to hook up your computer to your display, you'll probably want to have a 1:1 display where every pixel in the source corresponds to a pixel in the display so your text looks clear. It's counter-intuitive to think that giving a 720p signal to a higher-resolution 768p display will cause a loss in resolution, but it does. A single pixel might in the source might get blended into as many as 9 pixels on the display. Just like when you feed your LCD computer monitor a lower resolution signal than it's capable of the text becomes fuzzy.