You'd probably need to use either 720p or 1080p (assuming the plasma accepts a 1080p signal).

Since the original announcement of the 997 then the 998 now the 978, when it comes to the mainstream companies and their ongoing product offerings, there has been a considerable sum of water that has passed under the bridge. Honestly speaking, the 978 will have to be quite impressive, virtually trouble free and offered at a very competitive price before I would consider it. There is just too many attractive options out there in the marketplace and for my self with TWO 7125s and some pretty sophisticated outboard video processing, the Marantz 5005 being offered on this very website used as a pre-pro would be more than adequate for my needs.

Hmm, let's see, 5005(which is available now) or the 978(possibly available at some point in the future and not knowing the features or the price).
The clock is ticking.

At least in existing models, Marantz' processor is not powerful enough to do Audyssey room correction on TrueHD or STS-HD MA at, I believe, 24-bit/96KHz sampling.

So it dropped Audyssey. Lame. And that fact was never on their website; one needed to dig deep into the manual to find it. And even then, the wording was weaselly. Personally, I would never consider buying a Marantz.

For standard definition viewed on 768p panels, the best option may well be to send 480p to the display, taking advantage of the excellent deinterlacing capability of the ABT chip, but thereby ensuring that the image is only scaled once. I've never understood why it's often recommended to send 720p signals to a 768p panel (as it's "closest" to the native resolution) since that necessitates 2 scaling operations (480p to 720p in the source device or AVR/processor, then 720p to 768p in the display). Each scaling operation can only degrade rather than improve the image.

Of course, that assumes that the panel has a good scaler, but many do. It's certainly worth trying 480p.

The ABT2010 is a chip I've spent some time with and been quite happy with when used in conjunction with DVD's, but it does depend on the firmware implementation as well. The most likely Anchor Bay chip will be the ABT2015, which is similar to the ABT2010, so it should offer similar potential.

If your plasma is a "non-standard" resolution (the various flavors of 768p), my understanding is that it is prohibitively complex for the panel's native resolution to be supported (too many variations in timing and specific resolution). Some standalone video processors support it, but it's really hard to do - OPPO tried it with the BDP-83 during beta testing and concluded that there were too many problems. You'd probably need to use either 720p or 1080p (assuming the plasma accepts a 1080p signal).

So does the 83 have either of the chips you mentioned?

Ah, my Pioneer 5080 is a 768p but does accept a 1080p signal. That is how I have it set up with the oppo BDP-83. So does the 83 have either of the chips you mentioned? I'm very pleased with the DVD performance from the oppo and if the 978 can do the same with standard def TV it would be great.

Yes, the BDP-83 uses the ABT2010 chip as you can see in this image from OPPO's website. If you feel inclined, try sending DVDs at 480p instead of 1080p from the 83 to your Kuro and see if you notice any change in image quality (I realize the 5080 is doing just fine with 1080p). I'm very curious.

One drawback to setting the player to 480p is that it'll scale BD's down to 480p as well. It would be an interesting experiment, but might not be a good long-term solution.

I compared 1080p to 720p when I set up my oppo and couldn't really see any difference but I never used 480p. I'll check it out if I get a chance and report back. I suspect the scaling capability of my Pioneer is pretty good since I couldn't see any difference between 720p or 1080p from the oppo to 768p. I suspect I won't see any difference going between 480p and 768p but I'll check.