I would agree that the way to go on a player if you want to have as much as you can have today is the top players. Especially if you have a display that can accept 1080P because I bet the player's deinterlacer + 3:2 pulldown is superior to most display's.

Since we are having the discussion here, I can report back some early impressions of the Panny Bluray player. Relative to the XA-1 Toshiba HD DVD player, I am a little disappointed with the Panny. Its not picture quality, its just that the experience of using this player is not up to the level its price would suggest. It takes just about as long to boot up and also to load discs, etc as the Tosh. The on screen displays are much cruder and the perceived build quality is not even close to the Tosh. If you took the Toshiba logo off the Tosh player, changed some of the aesthetics to match the current M lineup, you could fool any of us into thinking the Tosh is a Meridian player in terms of build quality. The Panasonic feels, looks and the quality of the displays are like a $250 DVD player. The Tosh originally retailed for like $1100 and can now be bought for around $500. The Panny retails for $1100. So lets call price a bit of a draw because in time the Panny will come down. Yet, even if both sold for $500, the Tosh feels high quality, the Panny feels cheap. The overall feel is kind of like a box you get from your cable TV company. Not good IMHO. frown

Also the Toshiba just gives me the sense that they are more enthusiastic about their product and they want you to use it to maximum affect. The Tosh comes with a HDMI cable. The panny comes with a *composite* video cable. Thats it! On the plus side it does come with a "free" movie: 8 Below. Of course for $1100- you can bet you paid the full price for that movie! smile (I guess you could say with the Tosh you paid for the HDMI cable, but my point is it seems the Tosh player was packaged by a company that has some enthusiasm for what they are doing and the Panny was packaged by a company shipping just another widget). I've always been a fan of Panny since their DVD players did not have the CUE (though in later years I heard they did! frown Also the Tosh has RS-232 control and ethernet, the panny has neither of these.

Picture quality wise, I watched part of Kingdom of Heaven and Ultraviolet. I have to tell you that I was not blown away, but I will put this into perspective in a minute. Right now I want to say to Mark: I got a good laugh recalling your description of Ultraviolet's plot as making Aeon Flux look like Citizen Kane. I thought Aeon Flux would be eye candy and nothing more and it did have an interesting plot- which I think could have been much better if they took more time on it- whereas with Ultraviolet (I did not watch the whole movie) you are so right- theres just eye candy. Not that watching Leeloo kick some more ass is not a bad thing! smile

As to picture quality, I am using a several year old Runco 5000 projector and whats interesting is that all the noise and things I would see with DVD on my library (plasma) and family room (LCD) monitors, I do not see here. My little theory is that this DLP chip is rolling off the lowest level of black and thereby hiding the parts of the image where these artifacts show up the most. Bottom line is on this 1280x720 screen, the HD DVD and Bluray discs do look better than DVD but, its not the dramatic difference I saw on the other monitors. Again, I attribute this to the monitor/ projector one is using. In my case, I expect that the new projector will expose it, but advice for anyone wanting to use DVD as the format of choice for their theater is getting an older 1080x720 projector will work just fine- it just wont be state of the art, but that wouldnt be needed.

So on this compromised setup I would say that the Serenity HD DVD (I got my UK copy) and the Ultraviolet BRD both looked equally good. Kingdom of Heaven, the few scenes I watched- looked nice, but I wasnt blown away. I should note that Ultraviolet is MPEG-2 and a single layer BRD- yet its a short movie and I suspect it has high bit rates- it looked darn good- and it is very punchy, which I like.

Comparing sound quality. Serenity is DD+, which is a higher bit rate form of DD. Since I do not think our Meridian gear can take this higher bit rate (I wonder if it can? I should check) the tosh player converts it on the fly to DTS 1.5mb/s which is the most data you can get over the SPDIF connection that we currently have. The Untraviolet BRD has either 5.1 PCM or regular DD. So I have to compare between DD on Ultraviolet and DD+ which is then converted to DTS max bit rate. My first impression was the HD DVD of Serenity sounded very "strong". Whatever is going on, I think the DTS encoding is causing a signal that is about 8-10db higher than the DD. (Could this be dialog normalization on DD?) I played the Serenity soundtrack around 75 and the Ultraviolet one around 83 (this is in the range of DVD for me). Comparing both the Serenity one did sound a little more detailed and the bass was a little more pronounced, but this could be due to all kinds of things. Bottom line is both sounded darn good! I'll try setting the HD DVD to output the DD+ bitstream with no DTS conversion and it will be interesting to see the result... thats all from the front lines for now smile

best regards,
Jerry

Best regards,
Jerry
Main System: 861v6, DSP8000s in corners, DSP7000s Center and Sides, 1-9 humans.