Andrew, your new TV is 1080p. Your player can deinterlace the i(of a standard 480i DVD)to p and you say that it can scale the 480 to 1080. Your TV can also do both of these processes, and if the player hasn't previously done it, the TV has to do it in order to display a complete picture on the 1080p display. The question would be whether the player or the TV does a visibly better job of deinterlacing and scaling. Try all possible combinations, e.g. the player outputing 480i, 480p or 1080i(if it in fact outputs 1080i)and see if one looks better.
