Where's John Mason when we need him

- in many of the previous discussions he has weighed in and provided helpful discussion and useful links ! The perceived vertical resolution of 1080i is close to 720 while the perceived resolution of 720p is close to 720 (based on ATSC testing reports he cited but I can't quickly find the link - search for 1080 & 720 and his posts).
I have a Marquee8500LC and can see the 1080i scan lines when I get within a couple of feet of the screen so the beam spot size must be (close to) small enough to resolve most of the possible 1920 horizontal (if they're ever there)
That said, I did watch ABC's MNF and have seen some CBS NFL and any difference in PQ was very small if any - I was particularly looking for motion artifacts in the 1080i CBS picture after a season of MNF and they were very hard to see. Also in Dish's demo loop of basketball and baseball (at 1080i) they're difficult to see. In either case, they have in no way been distracting or calling attention to themselves.
The NFL comparisons are the closest I've come to the only definitive way of comparing the intrinsic PQ of 1080i vs 720p which would be : the same scene shot by two cameras simulataneously (one 1080i and one 720p) encoded at the same bit rate and decoded by top quality receivers and viewed on one system as an A/B comparison (or the same movie telecine'd on the same machine at the two formats )
Beyond that, any comparison of the two PQ's is confounded by many variables which have been done to death in previous threads (different material, different cameras, different encoding rates, mpeg artifacts, up, down, side and upside-down conversion, inadequate displays, sweetspots, signal paths, you name it)
So, worry about other issues than the intrinsic differences between 1080i and 720p - they're way more likely to explain any differences you see in flawed comparison efforts!