At this point in the game I'm waiting on blu-ray players to drop in price just a tad bit more, maybe Black Friday will bring the drop I'm looking for.
Right now I've got quite of few DVDs and for now they're what will be viewing. I found a deal on the Denon DVD-1940Ci and I'm curious whether it will offer a better picture than my HD-A3. Everyone always says HD-DVD players are great upconverters, but I think they're mostly refering to the Reon equipt players. While I can say that I have been impressed with the quality of some DVDs, The Prestige for example, some aren't as nice to look at. My question is simple: Would the aforementioned Denon upconvert DVDs considerably better than my HD-A3?
Before anyone recommends the Oppo 981 or any others please take note that I can buy the Denon for under $50. If it won't offer a decent upgrade in picture quality for my DVD collection I'll just put the extra towards buying a blu-ray player on black friday.

I've tested the 1940ci, it's a good player but it's old. Uses a the old faurodja dcdi chip. It also can't upconvert to 1080p, even though 1080i is still very close if not any worse. I compared it to the sony s350 bluray player and the sony does a much better job upconverting. It's the difference of looking near hd compared to just looking good.

I own a 1940ci and it will upconvert to 1080i or 1080p depending on which way the disc was recorded ( I can swear I saw it right there in the settings menu not to mention the manual). I can even play "some" PAL coded discs in that thing! It will also handle HDDVD discs of course, not to mention SACDS.

Here's the thing, I don't think you may find many DVDs or anything else at 1080p if at all. In north america currently no broadcasts are even in 1080p yet as far as I know. There are hardly any HD channels either, at least ones you don't have to pay $69 for. That whole "digital conversion" was a sham, PQ is worse than analog.

Don't forget the 1940ci (758) has a very good quality DSD1608 DAC.

SNR 108
THD+N 0.0012%

There are better but for a sub $50 machine, pretty dam good.

The 1608 is an 8 channel DAC: http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/dsd1608.html

The analog MC sounds excellent for SACD/DVD-A!

Does this mean the Denon 1940 does a direct DSD>>>analog conversion instead of going to PCM first?

the player will output 1080P


Yeah, i know i seen 1080p but forgot about it since you need to use the player to switch resolution settings.

I still stand by my statement the s350 upconverts noticeably much better though if that makes a difference to anyone.

The burr brown dacs are nice, and the sacd feature, but i don't think it's SQ is audibly better than any other capeable cd player, from just a dac standpoint.