Las Vegas this month was wall to wall with 1080p panels, and the number is on every sign because it is the largest number available. Sharp had a set over a hundred inches across. Everyone had something bigger and sharper than last year.
Nobody on the floor wanted to discuss what you would put into one.
Go through the sources actually available to a person buying a television this month. Broadcast high definition is 1080i or 720p depending on the network, and neither is 1080p. Cable and satellite compress hard enough that the delivered picture is often worse than the format suggests. DVD is 480 lines being upscaled, which is a guess made by a chip. Games consoles output 720p for most titles.
That leaves the two high definition disc formats, which are the only genuine 1080p sources you can buy, and which are in the middle of a fight nobody sensible wants to pick a side in.
So the specification being advertised most loudly is the one with almost nothing to feed it.
There is a second problem the industry is even quieter about, and it involves arithmetic anyone can do. Resolution only matters relative to how close you sit. On a forty-two inch screen viewed from the far side of an ordinary living room, roughly nine or ten feet, a person with normal vision cannot reliably tell 720p from 1080p. The extra pixels are below the resolving power of the eye at that distance. You need to sit closer or buy a considerably larger set before the difference becomes something you can see rather than something you know is there.
None of the sales material mentions viewing distance, because the honest version of the pitch is that most buyers should get a good 720p set and spend the difference on a better source.
What actually determines whether a television looks good is contrast, how it handles motion, and whether the processing is doing something stupid to the image. Plasma still beats LCD on black level and on fast movement by a margin you can see across a shop. Those qualities are hard to put on a shelf label, so they lose to a number.
The result is a market where the thing being sold and the thing that improves the picture have come apart, and the gap is being filled by people in shops recommending cables that cost more than the difference between two sets.
My advice for this year is to buy for contrast, sit where you actually sit before deciding on size, and treat 1080p as something you will grow into rather than something you will use. The content will arrive. It is arriving slowly, on discs, in the middle of a standards fight, and it will be a while.