Is a VS1 on the horizon at all or have those plans been superceded by the DVD5 forcing me down that route?

With the advent of HDTV, HD-DVD and BluRay, does it make sense to come out with a standard quality video controller? I'm not sure it does...

Regards,
Frank.
All opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinion of any organisations I work for, except where this is stated explicitly.

Why does it have to be standard quality?! I'm not being argumentative, but Naim are bound to put a lot of effort into it, and charge a fortune for the privilege so we should get some fancy features!! I’m not sure on the technical realities, but it could maybe be able to take in all sorts of inputs, upscale them all and output to whatever you like, component progressive, DVI, HDMI 1080p!! As well as this it would give the promised onscreen display to the AV2!!

I red somewhere that the futur optional scaling card of the DVD5 should accept an input via the scart and be able to upscale it up to 1080p like the player. All that needs to be confirmed.

Anyway, I think it is worth having a look at the DVD5 image. A perfect 576p should be nicer to watch than an average 720p or 1080i.

576p agreed!!! A good quality low resolution picture is much better than a high resolution crud picture. At the end of the day DVD PAL is only encoded at 576 isn't it?!, so as long as my screen is not too big and a 576p image looks great on it, who cares if it's technically in-superior to a 1080p image. You can get too hung up of technical details. Yes new stuff is good, but at the end of the day it has to sound and look good to the ears and eyes of the consumer, not just look technically superior on paper.

@SimonJ: Yes and no. DVD is of course noly either PAL or NTSC. Problem is, you screen, especially projectors nowadays have 720p panels, which means, your picture will have to be scaled one way or the other. So either let a cheap scaler in your screen or pj do it, or have it done properly by a Naim scaler or a scaler from someone else.
And in the long run, software won't stay 576. WMV HD DVDs are already on the market and BluRay and HDDVD are coming up in the US and Asia. So it would probably be nice to maybe someday see a Naim standalone scaler (not restricted to use with DVD5).

It's true of course, that DVDs playable in the DVD5 will stay 576p so why upscale for an ordinary TV, but with more and more Plasmas and LCDs and projectors being sold and almost none of them still having native 576, a scaler would help produce the best possible image quality.