I got a new Panasonic plasma television. Just a cheap model. It's only meant to be 720P, but my Xbox 360 will let me output 1080P and the television itself says 1080P when I look at the source info. Why's this? I'm confused.

My TV does this, My 360 will play at 1080P while my cable plays at 720P---I think it just has to do with the cable provider .

I'm not speaking out my cable provider. I'm talking about the very television itself. The television isn't full HD. It's meant to be 720P (1280x720), yet it's accepting 1080P. On older televisions, the Xbox blacked out options they couldn't do.

Are you sure it's only 720p? The only TVs I have seen recently that go that low are in the 32 inch range or smaller, maybe up to 40" on some low ends. Although, Plasma still does come in 720 at different screen sizes today.

It's a 42" Panasonic Plasma, released approximately a year ago. It was relatively cheap, only about ￡300 GBP. I could have gone with a 1080P LCD, but I much prefer plasma televisions so settled on 720P instead. The website I ordered from, as well as the people in store when I spoke to them, all said it was 720P. Yet, my Xbox is outputting 1080P onto it right now. The Xbox usually blacks out resolutions the television doesn't support.

It should be 1080.

720 is EOL. New TVs are almost exclusively 1080 unless you buy a trash brand like Vizio.

It really doesn't matter though. Something like three 360 games run at 1080P? None of them are major releases either. A lot of games aren't even full 720P.

At the very least though the TV is doing bicubic / Lancoz downsampling, which would look slightly better if you actually had 1080P rendering.

Maybe it is scaling the image down, but I don't know. It's a Panasonic Plasma. It was a budget model which came out around mid-2012 and according to the shop I ordered from was only 720P.

I'm confused as to how it can do this?

What's the indicator on the TV say? It should tell you what mode it's using in the info overlay (the TV itself, not the console and stuff). Does it say 1080, 1080i, or 1080p?

If you're 100% sure it's a 720p TV, but can handle a 1080p input signal, then it simply resize and scale down the 1080p signal to a 720p signal and then display it. So you're better of choosing 720p on the Xbox 360.

The TV info section is saying 1080P too, which is why I'm wondering whether it is scaling it down or actually outputting 1080P.

Well, it was labelled in shops and reviews a "HD Ready", which usually means 720P.

Doesn't matter what the ads say. What does the specifications section of the manual say?

I'll dig out the manual later. I'm pretty certain that said 720P though (don't quote me), thinking about it, so I'm presuming that it's scaling the image down.