Not sure if this is the right place, but here goes…

I am looking to purchase a Panny 1080p plasma here in the next few months. I am still a little leary about jumping into the HD DVD/Blu-Ray mix quite yet…maybe when the cost of solid dual-format players comes down a little bit. I am asking those who have made the jump…in regards to SD DVDs, will a standard upscaling DVD player (Oppo?) provide as good a picture as a hi-def player?

Not sure if this is the right place, but here goes…

I am looking to purchase a Panny 1080p plasma here in the next few months. I am still a little leary about jumping into the HD DVD/Blu-Ray mix quite yet…maybe when the cost of solid dual-format players comes down a little bit. I am asking those who have made the jump…in regards to SD DVDs, will a standard upconverting DVD player (Oppo?) provide as good a picture as a hi-def player?

No, and it never will. All upconverting does is scale a 480 line image to take up 720 or 1080 lines on your HDTV (which most/all HDTV's will do anyways, and better than upconverting players in most cases). It now fills your whole screen, but there's still only 480 lines of data there (the rest is interpolated in between the pixels it has data for) so it isn't gonna be nearly as sharp or detailed as a native 720 or 1080 line image.

Read the link in my sig.

No, and it never will. All upconverting does is scale a 480 line image to take up 720 or 1080 lines on your HDTV (which most/all HDTV's will do anyways, and better than upconverting players in most cases). It now fills your whole screen, but there's still only 480 lines of data there (the rest is interpolated in between the pixels it has data for) so it isn't gonna be nearly as sharp or detailed as a native 720 or 1080 line image.

I am not asking if a SD DVD on a upscaling player will look better than HD DVD or BluRay. How will the picture compare if I put a SD DVD in a upscaling player vs a SD DVD in a HDM player? I guess I am asking which player is better at showing an upscaled image.

I am asking which player is better at showing an upconverted image.Both players will upconvert. But this is completely UNNECESSARY as your TV will automatically upconvert a plain ordinary vanilla SD DVD player too.

So your question is really: which upconverts better .. the TV ... the HD-DVD player ... or the "Upconverting" SD DVD player??

That depends on the chip set used in the player like realta, reon or gennum. If both players have the same chip then they may be very similar but could still have different picture quality due to circuitry design.

I am not asking if a SD DVD on a upconverting player will look better than HD DVD or BluRay. How will the picture compare if I put a SD DVD in a upconverting player vs a SD DVD in a HDM player? I guess I am asking which player is better at showing an upconverted image.

There will be differences since different players/receivers/tv's can have different scaling chips and algorithms. I'm sure some HDM players scale DVD's better than some high-end DVD players, and the opposite is certainly true as well. The same comparisons can also be made with HDTV's vs DVD or HDM players since they have internal scalaing capabilites as well. As a general rule, most newer HDTV's will do a better job scaling SD than most consumer-level scaling engines in DVD/HDM players or AVR's.