I am looking at the new Sammy 1080P units coming out this summer. Mainly I am interested becuase of the high contrast ratio and then the 1080P format for down the road. I know there is a great deal of debate regarding the adoption of 1080P. The question is will the set display 1080i and 720P as good as sets that are designed accordingly?
The sets will display 1080i superbly, since the native resolution of a 1080P set will have 1080 horizontal lines of pixels. The "i" only designates how the image is scanned.
As for how well it will display a 720P signal, that depends on how well the TV up-scales the signal. It's similar to a 720P set upscaling a 480P signal. Some TV's do it better than others. A 720P set would likely have a slight advantage of displaying a 720P signal because there is no scaling involved. However, the difference would probably be neglible unless viewed side-by-side.