got my telewest tv drive running hd into my panny pw6b, (as the engineer from telewest could not do it only trained to do hdmi ) pq at 720 watching the blue planet is excellent, even the sd signals are much better fed via component into vga, now just need my n-vi to complete the picture

I think that some manufacturers on a limited budget produce HDMI for the sake of saying they have HDMI or for HDCP sake. Everyone's pushing it with the promise of better quality, but it's not the real driver. Just because it is digital does not mean it will be any better that analogue. In fact I bet some lower end manufacturers will have a very limited budget to produce a HDMI socket on their players and it may have less money spent on design and production than the component output got many years ago. Simularly does a £500 produced CD player sound better than a £1000 produced record player just because it's digital?! I bet if you asked 100 people in the street 80% would say the CD player. I have no doubt that DVI and HDMI can be very good, but a cheaply produced DVD player with HDMI tagged on the end is not a guarentee of quality. Source first etc, rubbish in rubbish out! Just my 2 pence worth from my findings and experimentation...