If you are thinking of purchasing an HDTV, there’s one critical variable that is emerging as increasingly important: resolution. Although all HDTVs are higher resolution than standard television (or even the DVD-quality EDTVs that are now almost non-existant), there are two levels of high definition emerging: 720p (which often comes a slightly enhanced version dubbed 768p) and 1080p. The latter, as the name would suggest, offers a sigificantly higher resolution (and, of course, a significantly higher cost). Can you tell the difference? Probably not if you’re watching an HDTV broadcast and aren’t sitting too close to the TV, but the emergence of the BluRay and HD-DVD video formats will soon make the difference potentially relevant. While 1080p rear-projection TVs (RPTVs) have been in production for some time, this fall we’ll see the emergence of mainstream 1080p LCD TVs from Sony (via their XBR2, XBR3, and V2500 lines) and 1080p plasma TVs from Panasonic (the PZ600 line). How “mainstream” (i.e. affordable) these TVs will be remains to be seen.