I just bought the Mitsubishi. In the Seattle area the Sony has not shown up, at least not in my area. The Panasonic is hard to find as well. The Mitsubishi is at least shipping.

I have learned a few things. I have a Sony KW-34HD1 HDTV. The OTA HDTV tuner in the Mits is FAR superior to the Sony tuner shipped with the TV. The Mits locks in to the HDTV OTA signal rapidly and is stable. The Sony could take up to 30 plus seconds and then would fail to lock onto the signal in many cases. The Mits also has a Signal Strength meter for BOTH the DSS signals and the OTA HDTV Digital signal. Using the HDTV signal meter it was very easy to aim my roof top rotator for maximum signal strength on the HDTV OTA signal.

I have found that contrary to what might seem logical, the picture on SD stations is MUCH better by setting the Mits tuner to think it is connected to a 4:3 TV, NOT the 16:9 that I actually have. I then set the 16:9 image to FULL in the Mits setup. The TV will scale SD stuff to fill the 16:9 screen much more cleanly than the Mits scaler. If the tuner is outputting a real 16:9 image the TV is smart enough to leave the image alone. Setting the tuner to FULL for 16:9 images does not cause any stretching.

The Advanced Guide is very cool. The setup allows you to set your zip code for local OTA/cable stuff. Based on that it will download the local show information into its guide so it is seamless to go from DSS to local. For local stuff you simply tune to channel 2 to whatever your highest local channel is. For DSS start at 100 and go up. Again, ALL of the channels are displayed in one guide seamlessly.

Another nice feature is that if you are getting your local stations via the local rebroadcast from the DSS, on DSS tuners such as the Sony SAT-A50 you would tune to a channel in the high 800 through high 900 range depending on your city. In my case the local ABC station is KOMO channel 4. The old Sony SAT-A50 listed the DSS rebroadcast as SE-4 channel 974. On the Mits, the ABC local station appears as:

SE-4 channel 4
KOMO channel 4
KOMO-DT channel 4-1

So all you have to do is go to the base channel of your local station and you can directly move from the DSS rebroadcast, the OTA NTSC analog to the HDTV signal simply by pushing the channel up/down button. This makes it incredibly easy to see the difference in signal quality. I live 30 plus miles east of Seattle in the woods with some low mountains between me and a direct line of sight to the tower. On the analog signal the image is pretty bad, the DSS rebroadcast is much better, the DTV image is incredible.

I would like the chance to see the Panasonic with its variable output format for the HD stuff. However, since it is pretty difficult to return a DSS tuner that has been activated, and without activating the tuner you really can not get enough to really form an opinion as to quality. I really do not fill like experimenting at >$700 a pop to see if the Panasonic or Sony HD100 is materially better :-).