If you play video games, there's a good case to be made for very high resolutions. While TV signals are constrained by the cable company, your Xbox, PS3 or high-end PC are perfectly capable of producing true 1080p signals, and they do make a visual difference. Ask anyone with a 24" monitor (which is 1080p, and hooks up to your 360 with a cheap adapter).

Xbox is 720P. Only PS3 has the Blu-Ray level picture, and only if you connect it via a 1.3/high-speed/108)P HDMI cord. And unless you're sitting within 2 inchesof your television set, a 24" 1080P monitor was a waste of at least $150. 1080P is one of the biggest scams on the market right now, because 1080P is completely imperceptible on sets smaller than 46", it's imperceptible if you don't have a blu-ray or PS3, and it's imperceptible if you don't have the right viewing distance from your television.

Trust me, a 720P television is all you need. Don't get fooled by the big shiny number.

Xbox is 720P.

Not true. Both Xbox 360 and PS3 can output 1080p. The only problem is that very few games on either system support 1080p. As of the beginning of the year, there were 24 native 1080p titles on the PS3 and 6 on the 360. Most of these are 1080p only because they're not graphically advanced enough to tax the GPU. The games with the best graphics are invariably rendered at 720p natively and occasionally lower (Halo 3 at "640p" for example) and then upscaled to 720p.

Although the difference between 720p and 1080p is imperceptible for me while watching video, 1080p does give you a higer resolution and less noticeable pixelation when hooking a PC up to the TV.

A lot of the PS3 games do not support 1080p (Guitar Hero for example uses 480p). I think some of the newer games looks great in 1080p (MSG4, wipeout HD, etc). Hooking up your PC to the TV is a great idea. Having high resolution means that you can have around 300 icons (I am not kidding) on your desktop, and you can stream tv shows from hulu or stream movies from netflix. With Real Time Strategy games on the PC, having a high resolution means that you can zoom out further, which actually helps the gameplay too. I am not sure about a 24" monitor, but on a 50" lcd tv (which you can buy for less than 1500 now) these are nice features for not so much money (consider how long the average person spends in front of their TV or computer and what people used to pay for big tvs).

The biggest problem I have with the PC/LCD TV set up actually has to do with wireless keyboards/mouse. Traditional infrared wireless keyboards/mouse don't reach over 6 feet, and the geniuses who created the standards decided to put bluetooth and 802.11G (most wireless routers out there today) on the same frequency. So when I download stuff my wireless keyboard/mouse do not work! The problem can be solved with the new 802.11N routers but then I have to get adapters for all of the desktop pcs and laptops I have in the house to use the 5ghz frequency.

"1080P is completely imperceptible on sets smaller than 46", it's imperceptible if you don't have a blu-ray or PS3"

A) I have a 40'' inch tv and everybody that comes over drools when I put in a blu-ray disk and show them the difference between the 1080i cable feed and a DVD.

B) Your 2nd comment is akin to saying that 1080p is imperceptible if the tv is off...d'uh...OF COURSE it's only noticible when playing a medium that happens to be 1080p...it's not imperceptable it simply isn't in your example...

The point of 1080p is not today...the point is, much like embracing any leading edge technology, that in 3-4 years there won't be a non-1080p television on the market...if you believe that cable/blu-ray etc..won't arrive sooner (in mass market terms) than you'd replace the tv...then pick 720p...if you believe in paying more to embrace the new digital standard...go for it...but don't tell me there isn't a difference

Sorry, Xbox is 720P. The most it can put out is 1080i, which looks like 720P because interlaced pictures blur in motion, and the result is a practical loss of resolution.

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Super late reply on this, but you're technically correct that the original Xbox which your link is describing could only do 720p, but when most people say "Xbox", especially when they're making direct comparisons to the PS3 like you did, they mean the Xbox 360, which is capable of 1080p. Anyway, I specifically wrote "Xbox 360" to clear any confusion of what I was talking about.