As you all know by now I have the ancient Hitachi VHS and a Hitachi DV-P745U dvd player that outputs up to 480p. The VCR is hooked to my 42" 1080p LG via composite to the dvd player which then runs component to the LG.

The Yamaha RX-v571 I am looking at has upscaling:

"1080p Video Upscaling: The RX-V571 is capable of outstanding upscaling and i/p conversion quality. This AV Receiver will upscale video signals from analog-to-HDMI and HDMI-to-HDMI, up to 1080p. This means a much better picture with HDTVs capable of 720p, 1080i or 1080p resolution. The receiver also features extremely precise motion adaptive and edge adaptive deinterlacing and multi-cadence detection (including 3-2 pull-down)."

So I assume that the output of my dvd player will be upscaled in some way to 1080p as long as it is output to the TV via HDMI. Is that right? Is it really going to look "right" that's a big jump from 480 to 1080. what exactly is happening? Or am I wrong in my assumption?

My next question, lets say I take the VCR and the dvd player out of the equation (they will go to the CRT TV in the den) and buy a nifty blu-ray player that puts out at 1080p. Does the need for the AVR to have upscaling go away? There are more options if I DON'T have to have an upscaling AVR.

RM (I assume the blu-ray would upscale regular dvds to 1080p? I am noticing though there aren't too many of those out there that I can see.)