Denon 5910ci and Sony XA9000ES

11-21-07: Elizabeth
"provided the transfer is good"
Provided the transfer is good on a 480p disc it is pretty damn fine.
Now when you expect all those old movies to be 'remastered' for bluhoo or Hd-d Please feel free to hold your breath.
I'ts gonna be a looooooooooooong wait.

I saw Spartacus in HD DVD. It was so sharp the resolution was limited only by the film grain itself.

I also have the HD DVD of Casablanca. It is downright stunning, better than I've seen it in the old "art" movie houses that thrived in the '70s and '80s.

I have many good std-def DVDs with excellent digital transfers. The Harry Potter series and Lord of the Rings trilogy come to mind. But they cannot TOUCH the resolution of the HD DVDs I've watched, and the way HD DVD draws me into the story action.

I have what I consider a decent display, but by no means the highest rez or state of the art. It's a 55" LCD RP Hitachi in 720p/1080i, but it's enough that when I watch a good 480p excellently upconverted by my Toshiba HD-D2 via HDMI, I still ain't fooling myself that I'm watching HD.

There are already HD DVD releases of some of my favorite old westerns, including The Cowboys (with John Wayne) and Peckinpah's Wild Bunch. You can bet these are NOT 480p transfers.

Universal in particular seems to be on a mission from God to make Hi-Def digital transfers of their film library. So much so that my cable package includes channel 660, UHD (Universal HD). Many of the films that show up on that channel have been made into HD DVDs, and the other films, since the hi-def digital transfer has already been made, will probably show up on HD DVD soon.

I am not going to buy everything new that comes out on HD.
Some titles I will re-purchase. Casablanca is one that I did. Stunning it is.

Tim

11-22-07: Flemke
I am not going to buy everything new that comes out on HD.
Some titles I will re-purchase. Casablanca is one that I did. Stunning it is.

I own 8 HD DVDs, but I didn't buy any of them. Three were gifts, and the other five were the freebies I got for buying a Toshiba and sending in the form to claim five free HD DVDs within the specified time frame. Casablanca was one of those. When I previewed it to see what it looked like, I had to call my wife into the room. The image quality of Casablanca blew her away.

For the rest of it, I set my Netflix profile to prefer HD DVD when available for a title in the queue.

On Dec. 11, Warner is releasing a 5-title HD DVD set of the Harry Potter movies so far. I smell a Christmas present. :)

Very interesting about the HD DVD. Sounds exciting. I'm still very interested to hear comparisons of the Denon 5910 versus Sony XA9000ES for Redbook Cd playback. I'm assuming both will satisfy for the other formats. I'll still be using my Toshiba HD ready TV with the old progressive scan 3 wire connection component video system for at least a couple of years and the Toshiba SD9200 DVD player seems to look ok for us. Would the new Benchmark DAC 1 from the SD9200 provide sound to equal the 5910 or XA9000Es?