my question is...
are either of these HD formats that superior over a well upsampled 1080i/p output ?
They are 1080p content.
If you're referring to broadcast television, then yes, they are superior. HD on cable/satellite is compressed - think of it as the mp3 of the HD world.
I get HD over the antenna for my locals...which is not compressed, and to date, nothing touches it...hell the local news broadcast (WRAL, the first to go HD all the time nationally from a local news broadcast angle) has the best picture I have ever seen..
I believe Nick is referring to upsampling players...such as the Oppo units....I recently bought a 981HD which upsamples to 1080p and the picture is freaking fantastic. Is HD or BluRay better? Maybe...but I have a library of normal DVDs that i have no intention on replacing and I am comfortable with my upsampling player until one of the formats goes the way of the minidisc
Depends on the channels. Most OTA channels now have subchannels, which do take away bandwidth from the main channel and causes a loss of quality. All of my locals do this, and from what I understand very few around the country do not. If you have one of those channels, it should look comparable to a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.
My DVD player is a Toshiba HD-D2, one of the best upsampling DVD players you can buy (and a great HD-DVD player to boot). I can notice a drastic difference between HD and upconverted SD on my set, and it's only 720p. A few movies I own look fantastic upsampled, though - particularly Pixar animated movies. The Incredibles looks HD when it's upscaled.
But for the most part, I can see a big difference which is why I made the jump to HD-DVD in the first place.