Have had a Panasonic Plasma ED monitor for a few years with standard Dishnetwork. Just switched over to digital cable with some HD channels which look great!
But the Panasonic is not HD, only ED with a pixel count of 852wX480h. The specs say it has a "scanning format" of 480, 575, 720, and 1080, whatever that means.
My HD Cable box allows me to set the box output to the Panasonic to 480i,480p,720p,or 1080i. Which one should I use? Or should I cycle through all of them and pick what's best? My engineering background doesn't really like that latter approach, although sometimes necessary :-)
The 480P or 480i is your best bett, but try them all and see which is best. In general, you should match the box to the resolution of the display. Less upscaling and downscaling. May vary according to station etc.
I tried them all and, strangely enough, both 720 and 1080 were much better than 480, which doesn't seem right given the 480 pixel count vertical. So we're going with 1080, but still wondering why :-).
Jack- The particular display you have, the Panasonic ED, is very very good at downscaling. By feeding it a 1080i upscaled signal ( if the box feed is a non-HD channel) you are not only getting excellent downscaling, but a progressive scan result as well ( deinterlacing via internal chipset). The chipset in the Panny ED plasma that deinterlaces is NOT the best, but it is very good.