@glial-Thanks for the clarification-it’s insightful for me, since I have not upgraded beyond SD yet at home.
It does seem that upscaling technology is going to be pivotal in convincing the mass market that upgrading to BluRay is necessary, as combo players will definitely be a key strategy for marketing BluRay.
As I think about it, this is a similar situation happening in audio with downloadable media (lo res .mp3) versus DVD-Audio/SACD and the like-it’s so interesting that those two formats never took off because most people are ‘satisfied’ with .mp3 quality audio.
Convincing users to make that switch from component to HDMI is a big part of the equation, but as folks start seeing the difference for themselves (as you have), I think eventually HDMI and all-digital will become mainstream…It’s a slow and ugly death for analog-component is definitely a part of that!
I do think that since upscaling tech is not standardized, it will matter from player to player which algorithm/codec/chip etc. has superior upscaling, and I have read good things about the Toshiba A30.
One could compare this same tech to some of the high-end audio stuff out there that ‘enhances’ .mp3 audio files-Bose, et. al have this now for .mp3 players, and for iTunes you can buy plug-ins such as iWow that also ‘rectify’ audio that is low bit-rate.