I saw this on HD Beat. It finally looks like someone is getting receiver setup right. I almost hate to compliment Sony at this point but they are at least leading the trend here. My Onkyo from 5+ years ago had what can only be called a rudimentary on screen setup when compared to this. Mine was basically displaying the text from the LCD on the receiver in a more readable fashion. One of the problems that was quickly apparent was it didn't work on anything better than S-Video. This wasn't a huge problem at first, but now I don't have anything other than component or HDMI running to my projector.
This new receiver is able to handle everything up to 1080p. It is also able to display its interface and do other controls at that resolution. This is a big upgrade. Also as you can see from the screenshots there is an entire GUI to assist in configuring the receiver. The receiver also has the ability to convert from other inputs to an HDMI output, it may also upconvert but I am not sure. One other nice feature is to be able to implement Picture in Picture even if your display device doesn't.
The receiver hasn't even been released yet and it is already out of date however. It only supports HDMI 1.2a and not 1.3. This means it doesn't support the transmission of Dolby Digital TrueHD or DTS HD. Hopefully that feature will show up soon along with the other features to enable full enjoyment of HD optical discs like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.

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