I have a HL-6163 DLP set like yours and I am very satisfied with it. (I don’t know about the 720p native resolution part and I thought it was a 1080i set. If it is 720p native resolution, I suppose it would be better to feed it 720p inputs, rather than 1080i and have an additional down-conversion step.) But nonetheless, it looks very good with my Samsung HD-850 ($140) 1080i up-converting DVD player. It looks better still with my son’s Sony PS3 60GB blu-ray player ($500) both on games (so far all 720p) and blu-ray at 1080i. There is an improvement with blu-ray, but you would have to decide for yourself if it is a big enough improvement for the cost. (You may see the improvement but a wife may not, or may not care, for example – fair warning if you have competing priorities for your money). The improvement is mostly an increase in picture clarity and black shading. It is like a manual focus camera where you have a little blurriness, then you get the focus just right and you see more sharpness and detail, especially in the background. I think HD DVD and blu-ray have about the same picture quality so you could expect the same results with HD DVD. I have not shopped for high definition DVD players so I will leave that subject to others for advice. All I can vouch for is that the HL-6163 DLP will produce a very high quality picture with high resolution sources, either digital HD broadcasts, HD satellite or high definition DVD. I can’t speak for cable. The DLP picture on this set is nice because you don’t see scan lines or pixel edges and you get one continuous image. You can sit pretty close to the set and get a very big screen experience.
