Congratulations, bentyman! Hope you'll enjoy your new gear!

DJ

Quoting FilmAlba:

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Quoting bentyman:

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Finally, with the purchase of the Panasonic Viera TX-L42S20E I finally got FULL HD. All my equipment is now set to 1080p 1080i for my Vantage Satellite tuner. Tomorrow I will calibrate my set with DVE HD Basic to optimize my new LCD Screen

I recommend on the satellite tuner setting the resolution to 720p. Just if your watching fast moving stuff like sports for example. Because the i in 1080i stands for interlaced so it's not a constant pictuer unlike p which means progressive.

With interlace it lay's lines out across the screen which is fine with slower moving images. But with faster images it starts to show a lot lot more.

Especially with an LCD which only has a refresh rate of 100Hz...looks pretty nasty .

Do you have a receiver and if so, does it support Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD and DTS HD?

You'll want those if you have a Blu-Ray player hooked up.  This is my next upgrade scheduled for tomorrow

Try it and see how the quality is.  If you can't see any shearing, 

There's no going back now.
HD is awesome, but it hurts when the basketball or hockey game gets moved to the channel that doesn't have an HD version now (thankfully Comcast just added FoxSportsPlus HD, so that should be over now!). It's almost impossible for me to watch sports in SD anymore, I've been spoiled.

Just wait until you get that first perfect looking BD. The first Pirates of the Caribbean I felt like I could walk into my screen and be part of the movie. The remastered Gangs of New York was almost as good.

Quoting bentyman:

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Yes I have a receiver that supports any of the new sound formats
And it also has an i/p scaler installed. wich is set to ON. Can I then set my satellite receiver to 1080i or do you still suggest 720p?

I'd use the screen resolution that matches the signal resolution best.
e.g. if the satellite your dish is linking up to is sending signals with a res of 720p a setting of 1080i on your receiver would mean an upscaling (usually by interpolation) to 1080i. Since 1080i in fact is not much more than an upscaled (interpolated) 540p, this would end up in actually losing signal information.

There are a lot of discussions going on. The purists say if you can't get 1080p use 720p, because it preserves the most of the original information. The pragmatists say that you normally need a much bigger screen to actually see a difference between 720p and 1080i.
I own a Viera TX-P50U20 (Plasma) that gets it's signals from a HTPC (incoming satellite signals at 720p upscaled (hardware) to 1080p). This is making a nice viewing experience, but a (random) split-screen test revealed that neither me nor my wife and my friends could really tell the difference between 720p and 1080p for the TV signals. Funnily this test gave a completely different result when we downsized 1080p BluRays to 720p (Yes, we Germans have our funny moments too).

I guess this "not much of a difference" for TV signals is resulting from the fact that true HD content is still hard to find. Mostly you get upscaled TV-resolutions (420p) even on the so-called HiDef stations.