At the moment I don't want to buy a HD or Blue-Ray player, but as I have just bought a HD ready Panny Plasma I wondered if it is worth paying for a new dvd player with a HDMI socket to get an upscaled picture?
My current dvd player is a Pioneer DV-370, which is connected by RGB scart. It is capable of PAL progressive scan, so should I just get some component cables for it rather than get a a new player?

Just get a set of componet leads as any upscaling dvd will only do the same scaling as the tv does..! so better just to let the tv do the scaling or you might end up paying the same for a high end upscaling dvd player as that of a hd-dvd player..!!!

The upscaling is needed to match the SD to the panel, and the panel knows it's own characteristics better than any external player, so, as okuda says, I'd let the TV do it.

We do this with our Panny Plasma (Toshiba DVD, scart connection, S-Video - I think) and the picture is excellent off most discs.

If you have a cheap TV, the scaler could be crap. If you have a good DVD player scaler could be better. Depends.

He has a good quality TV so his upscaler would be fine.

I'm planning to buy the Panasonic TH42PX70 which I'm guessing has a v. good upscaler as generally, the tv gets good reviews.

Would it be correct to assume that I would be better off connecting my existing dvd player via component leads than HDMI because with component, the tv is doing the upscaling whereas with HDMI, the dvd player is doing the upscaling?

Presumably your DVD player is an upscaling one?, so I would expect both HDMI and Component to be upscaled - presumably there's a menu option to turn it off?.

I told a white lie. My current dvd player / recorder is scart only so I'm looking to buy a new one with divx playback.

Do I need an upscaling dvd player or not given the fact that I'm going to buy the Panasonic plasma screen?

We have a big Pana plasma TV and a standard DVD with scart connection (prob RGB, I really must check), so the TV handles the scaling. Somewhat to my surprise the picture is superb (except when the DVD itself isn't that good - mainly on one US TV series from a few years ago that has probably been converted from NTSC and you can see some imperfections). So I will be sticking with the SD DVD at least until HD stuff is a reasonable price.

I would suggest not, just a good Divx player with component out would do the trick. No benefit in having a DVD Upscaler with a good Plasma.