720p FTW. Save your money and spend the rest on cigars. :halfgrinw
Just so I am clear on the better technology. And yes your right 720p is less money for a reason.
That's all you need to know about numbers. 1080i has more pixels, end of story.
Then there's the other, more important side of this argument.
When you're talking about MOVIES, which is what people usually talk about when it comes to home theaters. (you're not buying all that gear just to watch the news on)
Movies are filmed at 24 full frames per second. Which is to say 24p, ie Progressive. If you scan the movie to full HD you get 1920x1080p24, then to convert it to American broadcast standards which is 60hz you do a 3:2 pull-down (look it up) and then splits up the fields into 60 fields per second which exactly converts the 24p to 60i, interlaced. This is lossless and reversible, basically what it does is to show 60 half-frames per second (including some duplicate fields) instead of 24 fullframes. You can return to 24p by a process called Inverse Telecine (ie 2:3 pull-up).
This, ladies and gents, means that for all movie content, a 1080i60-signal will deliver exactly 1080p24 quality if you treat the signal correctly. Make sure your TV knows how to do inverse telecine correctly without dropping any information.
So let's multiply again, with this new found knowledge shall we?
1920 * 1080 = 2.073.600
1280 * 720 = 921.600
Now, I don't want ANYONE saying that 720 is better than 1080 again, it's just half the information, if the source is a movie, even if it isn't a movie, there's still more information in 1080i.
***720p is a mid-ground in HDTV which really doesn't deliver that much more above DVD, it's nice but not great.***
You may wonder what 1080p is good for, well imagine 1080p60, that's 60 fullframes per second of 1080 resolution. That will double the bandwidth, and it's mostly live-situations and video that uses that sort of refresh rate, no movies use it.