Good points.
There'll always be room for improvement, it'll just become smaller and smaller.
So every extra £ spent will bring less of an improvement.
You'll find many, many people here (and I'm one of them) who'd argue their home cinema looks better than their local cinema.
The best your home cinema can look is as good as the best quality print at an arthouse cinema.
As we get closer to that with our home set-ups, the gap gets smaller. The smaller the gap, the harder and more expensive it is to make smaller improvements in quality.
As an example - I have a relatively modest set-up. For HD DVD it's an HD-E1 and an Optoma HD73 projector.
Let's take that as a starting point. Then let's take the best cinema picture as 'the ultimate'. A £2,000 Denon
must come in that gap. It
cannot be better than an excellent cinema.
Frankly, whilst my set-up is far from perfect, it is not massive.
The best PQ I've ever seen is a couple of pristine prints at NFT1. I consider my set-up to be good enough that, I don't think I'd spend £500 on a relacement for my HD-E1, even if it brought me up to being on par with NFT1. It's that close.
Of course, if I won the lottery, and money was no object...
But people will talk about "night and day" differences. Well there aren't night and day differences between a releatively cheap high def player and NFT1 - but I'm sure some high end fans will try to magic it up from somewhere.
I agree with Jeff that there are features which can be improved - particularly on the sound front - but not much more.
I notice he mentions broader colour space, and we've had HDMI 1.3 offering the possibilty of this.
The problem is firstly that the information needs to be on the disc. No £10,000 super-duper Meridian can invent information not on the disc in the first place.
Secondly, it's debateable how much of an improvement this would bring. We see banding on some high def images and not others. Most of us see banding very rarely.
Steve W