I saw the new Yamaha S2700 last weekend and it had an amazing picture!!

How close is the S2700 to the Denon 2930CI for video performance? Has anyone actually a/b-ed them?

I have a Denon 2930CI right now but my receiver is a Yamaha and the cable box has an orange display as well so I would love to get the Yamaha if it matched the Denon's video performance.. (And have all displays be orange lit) the Yamaha also seemed to cue up disks quicker than my Denon too. The Remote is also better..

The S2700 seems to be world's above last year's S2500...

Simply put, no.

Any / every product with Faroudja DCDi processing is going to be inferior. It's inferior technology and it produces an inferior picture.

The Yamaha S2700 is a relatively good implementation of Genesis' Faroudja solution, not quite up to the standards of the Oppo players, but this isn't in the same league with HQV. With Faroudja-based players like the Yamaha, you will see macroblocking on many DVDs; this macroblocking will be more obvious on some displays than others. You don't get any of that with Silicon Optix HQV. The HQV processing puts the Denon 2930ci and 3930ci is an entirely different league.

The following players implement Silicon Optix HQV for DVD playback:

Denon 2930ci
Denon 3930ci
Denon 5910ci
Samsung BD-P1200 (Blu-ray player)
Samsung DVD-HD1080P7
Toshiba HD-XA2 (HD-DVD player)

If it's not on that list, personally I would not buy it.

Personally, I have the S1700 - same video as the 2700 - and as the first poster stated, it has an amazing picture - on my Sony XBR1; no macroblocking, cue, etc. Almost - almost - HD quality. Silicon whatever notwithstanding.

I also have the dvd-s2700 and i agree with ''gtaylor0'' about the video performance,but the audio performance trough the analog output is the main reason why i chose it,the only thing wrong with this player is the cheap looking remote.