is it worth the $$ to purchase a blue ray player if your tv is only 1080i capable??

Certainly. Blu-ray lets you feed a true high-def source to your HDTV. Here's a convenient reference: compare DVD to a good HD broadcast. If you see a difference, you'll see as much or more difference between DVD and Blu-ray (since even good HD broadcasts routinely get more compressed than Blu-ray).

Santa left us a Panasonic BD55, and we have it hooked up to a 42-inch 720p Pioneer Elite plasma. Had a friend over for a few hours, and we sampled a number of discs -- Casino Royale, Planet Earth, Springsteen Live in Dublin, Cars, Prince Caspian among them -- and we agreed the picture was a marked improvement over the picture from my Oppo 981 (seated about 7.5 feet from screen). Did a direct comparison of the remastered Adventures of Robin Hood (DVD and BD) and while both discs are amazing for a 70 year old film, we both felt the BD had slightly richer colors and better detail definition, particularly in action sequences. If you like film, I would highly recommend getting BD at 1080i, as our experience is that a high-def output to a hi-def display is hard to beat.

in general I think it is worth it if the blu ray library has or will have material that you're interested in.

I run an HD DVD player (still) to my 720p Pioneer and for many films, the picture is simply fantastic. But certain transfers to HD DVD (which is lb for lb equal in video quality) did not impress. My copy of "The Perfect Storm" did not look so great and I'd venture to say that a good upconverted DVD of the same movie would have looked almost identical.

However, Blade Runner, a much older movie, never looked so good

I'll eventually go BR, although I'm still licking my wounds from being on the wrong side of the format war. I think the Oppo BDP will be my pick because of its versatility.

yes i've been an electronics junkie for a long time now, and always looking to improve. I have the oppo 983h and the pic is terrific,for hd I have the toshiba hda3 and thats great for hd.(too bad they lost out),But from what im reading the Blueray,especially the panny will improve a little on the video side and on the audio as well?dont know for sure tho?

I have both a Blu-ray and HD-DVD player. I got copies of The Kingdom, Serenity and Blood Diamond on both formats. I ran a comparison of all three copies using Hdmi output. I set both players to their default video settings. I felt that the BD looked a little richer in texture and color during the action sequences in Serenity. However, I could not distinguish any noticeable differences with The Kingdom. Both seemed almost identical to the other. Nor did I notice any huge change in pic quality when viewing blood diamond. Bottom line they both look great.

what about audio? any diff. there?

Depends on how you have things hooked up. Lossless audio formats (multichannel PCM, TrueHD, or DTS-HD Master Audio) can be a great experience under the right circumstances, although like anything else they rely on the quality of the master source. (Don't expect to hear a huge difference between DD and TrueHD for a title that is predominantly dialog, for example.) You need to be able to get to those new formats, though. If you can play those formats and you have a surround setup, the new audio options are a definite plus for Blu-ray over DVD.

If you are talking about HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, the two formats should be directly comparable (equal) in most ways. That's one reason the format war was so foolish to begin with. HD-DVD has less disc space, so you may see cases where more compression was used and a Blu-ray release may have an edge on video, but that's hardly a valid across-the-board guarantee. In fact, some early Blu-ray releases relied on older compression algorithms and couldn't match HD-DVD even with the extra disc space, although studios have by and large gotten past that phase. The HD-A3 lacked multichannel analog outputs, so the only way to get TrueHD (the only lossless format to see much use on HD-DVD and the only one supported by the HD-A3) was via multichannel PCM over HDMI. Otherwise, the best you get is Dolby Digital over optical (or DTS for HD-A2 owners like myself) that's encoded on-the-fly from the decoded TrueHD track. A player like the BDP-83 or the Panasonic BD55 will/can output decoded TrueHD and DTS-HD MA (which is showing up pretty regularly on Blu-ray these days) over analog for folks who lack HDMI v1.1+ receivers and processors, which is going to be a better route than DD from the A3.

thanks Gonk,iam going to wait for the oppo version and see what all the hubbub is all about.i figure that i'm running the oppo 983h and the toshiba hddvd a3- now so im goning to hold off spending cash on a blue ray player until i see this new oppo. makes sence huh??thanks for you input as always.

Sounds like a good plan...