Stan, one point to keep in mind is that your TV can't "display 1080i" in any case. It's an inherently progressive scan set with a "native resolution" of 1080, so to even show a complete picture any incoming material which isn't 1080 has to be scaled to that and incoming i material has to be deinterlaced to p; in both cases the set itself would have to do this. So as always the question would be whether a player or receiver would do a visibly better job of scaling or deinterlacing than the set itself does. For example, in your case it's possible that the 1080i input would look just as good as the 1080p input.
