I ran down to Best Buy Today to grab a couple items and was actually impressed by one of their displays.
They had 3 identical Sony 1080p 40" LCD sets lined up, all were playing Cars on Blu-ray each set was labeled and set at a different resolution, 480p, 720p and 1080p.
If I hadn't just bought a set in 1080p that would have sold me, there was a definite difference in PQ in all resolutions that I could notice from when I stood anywhere from 1' to 8' feet away. I would of gone farther back but I didn't have my long range glasses with me.

I would first find out if all of the video adjustments (contrast/ picture/brightness ect.) were set exactly the same on all three sets.

Best Buy is known for tuning and adjusting certain sets to make them look better than others depending on what sales they are trying to get. I work with a guy that worked at 2 different Best Buy stores in my area for over a total of 5 years and says that this was not just a common practice, but actually managers tasked the workers in that department to tune in certain sets to boost certain models' sales. He did say though that while it did happen, it was VERY rare that they actual adjusted a set to make it look bad so that another "hot sale" item looked even better.

Yup, that was operational policy at another futuristic big box store I know of. Not illegal but certainly deceptive and immoral.

I have found most TVs come factory set with the most dynamic setting as default and whenever I have checked in-store settings I have found them to be on default.

Then you have actually found an honest store, or one where they are not smart enough to realize turning down all but the ones they want to sell would be beneficial.

When my buddy quit working for the afore mentioned store, he told me of this rather disapointing practice and that it definitely works. The brightest TV always gets the crowd around it and gets the most questions asked.

He suggested I try going in as an experiment and ask to check the settings on a few sets. He predicted that their well trained reply would be "Sorry, but our manager hides all the remotes so people wont tinker with the picture."

I asked and the response was exactly that, word for word. He even used the word "tinker". I mean come on, what teen ager in this day and age is going to use the word "tinker" without prompting. heh heh.

Well, I would not buy a tv without being able to "tinker" with the remote.

What keeps people from bringing in universal remotes?'

someone should bring in a dvd player and a copy of DVE and calibrate the cheapest tv to look the best... Then somehow lock all the settings!