Being a current owner of a DV-09, I have always loved the picture quality of this machine, and am more than satisfied with the analog and digital audio from this player. There's a lot more to picture quality than feeding a digital video display a digital signal via DVI/HDMI and assuming the picture quality will be better than the analog output on another player (interlaced or progressive), even on a digital display.
I'm using a high def LCD projector (1280X720) and think the color reproduction on this display from the DV-09 via component is still among the best i've seen. Don't get me wrong, I also assumed that any DVD player with DVI output would be a huge improvement over the DV-09, so I went to great lengths to justify spending the same amount of money on a new player that I would probably get from selling the DV-09. Tried a Denon DVD-1910 and could not believe how much better the pioneer looked. Not to mention the obnoxious transport moise from 10 feet away, and sound quality that was lean and sterile. Also tried a Toshiba and Sony in the $250 range with DVI/HDMI outputs. Pretty much the same results. Picture was marginally sharper, but color, motion and sound quality were not in the same league as the 7 year old Pioneer (toshiba was ok). There's been a lot written about DVI/HDMI players being sharper than non-digital players on a digital display, but there is often a loss in color accuracy and saturation with the digital connection.
If the video processor in your display device is better than the one in the DVD player, it's pretty much irrelavent and comes down to sound quality. Send it interlaced component (or S-Vid) and let it do the hard work. Like the others mentioned, if you have an analog display, the DV-09 is hard to beat. In my case, it's likely that the processor is good enough to make the difference between digital and interlaced componednt a non-issue.
There may be budget DVD players that could do everything better than the DV-09, but I haven't seen anything under $500 that makes it a slam dunk, and the sound quality of the pioneer is still very hard to beat.
