The drawback (especially these days) in making a near-cutting-edge piece of equipment is that there's always some new feature that you can't include that is beginning to get used (or that might possibly get used one day) that somebody considers a "must have". I had actually never heard of D4 until you made this post. Did some digging with Google and found some info on it, but not much. JVC and Sharp both have HDTV's with D4 inputs for HD material, and Yamaha has a front projector with it as well (the review of the Yamaha projector here describes it as being a "Japanese input format"). Most HDTV signals these days go over component video connections, and the Outlaws recently confirmed that the component video switching in the 950 has enough bandwidth for HD and progressive scan DVD signals. Video formats like DVI (which I give more importance to, since I've seen more about it) and D4 can still be used with the 950 by not passing the video signal through the pre/pro. Unless you have a number of devices fighting for one input, there's no trouble there (which for DVI and D4 is pretty unlikely -- you'll be hard pressed to find one device to use it with, much less 2 or 3).

I still don't really know what D4 actually is, so anybody who knows please chime in, but the absence of it on the 950 seems like a stupid reason to pass on getting one. (By the way, I did do some gathering of features on the 950/770 and some similarly-priced alternatives the other day and may try to post it next week -- none of them included D4 either ).

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Gonk