[EDIT: Urrhh, the post from Michael that I was responding to appears to have vanished. I'll leave the reply here anyway in case he is still looking for this info.]
Michael,
The difference in this display's native resolution vs standard transmission resolution (768 vs 720) has to do with arcane issues of manufacturing and yield in the display production process. Not to worry, the display will handle the conversion (scaling) so that you can see a 720p or 1080i HDTV or upscaled DVD image correctly. Any display which does this poorly will get knocked pretty regularly in reviews.
That said, some displays do a better job of this when fed a 1080i signal, others when fed a 720p signal. Curiously, it is *NOT* always the case that they do the best scaling job when fed the signal that's closest to their native pixel count. And sometimes how well they do this also depends on whether they are being fed an analog signal (as with Component cables) or a digital signal (as with HDMI or DVI cabling). Try each and see which you like better. Also if fed a standard TV 480i signal or a progressive DVD's 480p signal, that too will be scaled to the displays internal pixel count.
Keep in mind that if you are feeding a digital 720p or 1080i signal to your display from the HDMI or DVI output of an "upscaling" or "upconverting" DVD player, then what you are actually seeing is 480i data -- the only data that's actually on any DVD today -- converted up to that resolution by the DVD player, and then converted again by your display to its native pixel count. It would be natural to assume this double conversion would be worse than passing the unmodified 480i data to your display and letting the display do the one and only conversion necessary to match it's physical pixel count. Due to arcane details of how this is done, however, that is by no means always the case. Often the quality of the conversion in the DVD player is better, and/or the elimination of conversions between digital and analog format that can be achieved by letting the DVD player do the job and then send over an HDMI or DVI digital video signal, outweighs the cost of an extra scaling step. Again, try various combinations and judge for yourself which result you like best.
The comment on "94%" of a 720p signal has to do with how the display is setup by the manufacturer as regards "overscan". I.e., the factory has set the horizontal and vertical image sizes so that part of the image is lost behind the edges of the display. They do this because it makes it less likely you will see noisy edges if there's a problem in the source content. Some TV programs, for example, get shifted up and down a bit and if there were no overscan you'd see noise on the top or bottom. This has become much less of a problem than it was many years ago, and indeed some displays offer user level controls to adjust the overscan so that you can see the entirety of the signal. But if you do so, you will occasionally, even today, encounter noisy edges from some source devices and with some source content. In that case you would either live with the noise for the duration of that program, or reset enough overscan to eliminate it during that program. If you do adjust the horizontal and vertical image size, be sure to adjust both so that circles remain looking like circles and not ovals.
--Bob
