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1. 

   At best it can look pretty close to HD DVD or Blu-ray on a 720p HDTV or projector. It wouldn’t be as close to 1080p though.

   I say at best because a cheap upconverting player won’t do a very good job (probably worse than your HDTV would do). But on a good upconverting player (e.g. oppo 971, 981), connected over DVI or HDMI, you will get pretty darn good results. Not equal to HD DVD or Blu-ray, but good.

   I use my HD-A2 HD DVD player as my upconverting DVD player on a 720p projector, and on my 110 screen I’m very happy with the picture. In testing I didn’t see much difference between DVD and HD DVD in A/B comparisons … so I now buy DVDs and am quite satisfied.

   Re HD DVD or Blu-ray … do a search on Yahoo! Answers … the question has been answered at least 100 times in the last few weeks.

   My view is DVD will stay the mainstream format for years yet, and both HD formats will remain as a niche market. The problem is that far too many people can’t benefit from HD disks for a number of reasons (no HDTV, too small, no HDMI connection, sit too far back, etc), and other will choose not to switch.

   In the long run there will be dual (actually multi) format players selling in the $400-$500 range so we’ll all play what we want.

   On the other hand maybe one format will win … you will find support for all possibilities, but no-one yet knows.

   If I were buying now … and I did … I’d do the same thing: Buy an inexpensive HD DVD player (Amazon have them at $125 and up) and use it as an everything but Blu-ray player. If Blu-ray wins simply add a blu-ray player.

   Comment by agb90spruce — January 15, 2009 @ 2:11 pm

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