I am planning to purchase with the Pansonic 50PZ700U as well as an AV Receiver. From reading these threads I understand that this Panasonic has a scaler than will upconvert video signals to its native resolution of 1080P. So would buying an AVR receiver like the Pioneer Elite VSX-82TXS, which has a Faroudja DCDi HD Video Scaler be a better processor than the TV's video scaler? Or do I not need a receiver with a video scaler because the TV already has a good one? The reason I want to know is that I have many standard DVDs and would like to watch them on the Panasonic set with as good a picture as possible. Thanks for any advice.

From what I read the scaler of the 700u is good when it comes to DVDs just not soooo strong (but far from bad) with bad/ highly compressed 720p HD. I also think that the Faroudja DCDi scalers are good, but not so much better and I would not buy the receiver just for the scaling. I do prefer to scale at the source and buy a DVD/HD Player with excellent scalers. The Samsung Bluray BDP-1200 as well as Toshiba's XA2 HD-DVD Player have the REON HQV processor/scaler. That one is really amazing in scaling DVDs and beats the Faroudja and more important you can even watch Bluray/HD DVDs on your 1080p TV.

To make it short, look for players with state of the art scaler, because with Receivers you buy the high end with so many extra features that all cost money and you only wanted a good scaler.