Well I finally got the player today! Sure is a pretty piece of hardware. I decided to put the player through some tests so...
First I put in Star Trek DS9, the source of my discontent. Gone are the combing artifacts and jaggies!! Shame I just finished the series, but it has me jonesing to start TNG all over again, so it'll pay off.
It's funny to test the 24hz output, I put in Sahara for the opening credit sequence, but then I watched a battle scene at the beggining and freaked out because there was no bass(I remember some people having bass management issues with various players). After fiddling with the settings, I remembered Sahara was one of those early titles that got screwed in the LFE dept. So I put in Matrix and the theater room started shaking appropriatly.
Also, the 24fps thing is a mixed bag. I've had it on the PS3, but they say the opening credits of Sahara is the best example(which I have on HD DVD).
Without 24fps, there is a definite unnatural jerkness to the camera movement.
With 24fps, it's smooth panning all the way... but it's like it substitutes one motion artifact for another, as the text of the newspaper clippings becomes a bit distorted and harder to read when the camera moves. I think I prefer it with 24fps on, but the difference isn't much to write home about.
Lastly, I put in Mission Impossible 3 for the ole' staircase test, and kiss my grits the artifact is gone!!
So yeah I'm happy.
It IS a bit annoying that I have to turn the 24fps off for SD material, but this will get less and less anoying as I'll have more Blu Rays than HD DVDs, and I plan to replace the occasional HD DVD when deals come along.
Oh, I'm having a brainfart. When playing the next gen audio formats, sending them to the receiver which won't decode them, I need to set HDMI audio to PCM right so the player decodes it?