Personally, I wouldn't pay extra for the up-conversion. If a DVD player in the price range you're looking in has it, then it doesn't hurt to get it. But I don't think it's a feature worth paying extra for. The video information is either there, or it isn't. So an upconvert is really just a guess as to what pixels might go there, to fill in the blank. Granted, it ought to be a darn good guess, but still...

I've been making do with a cheap DVD player for the past couple months, since my DVD-RW went out. I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a DVD player, when I know I'll be buying a nice one next year, when the new formats come out (High Definition capable DVD's, aka, Blue-Ray and/or DVD-HD). It didn't make sense to me to spend a couple hundred bucks, now, on something that will be obselete in a relatively short period of time.

As to the cables...

Analog signals need a very high quality shielding, to prevent stray noise/interference from messing with the signal. Digital feeds, however, don't have this problem. The signals are simply 0 and 1s. So the end machine either gets the 0 and 1s, or it doesn't. There is no in-between, or possibility of interference, as the equipment doesn't read anything other than the 0 and 1s from the digital source. You either get video and/or sound (depending on what equipment we're talking about), or you don't. There is no middle ground.

However, cheap cables usually mean cheap connectors and/or the possibility of wire breaks along the way. Especially with optical cables. If there's a break in an optical cable, it's useless. If there's a break in a copper/regular cable, it may not be useless, but it could cause some of the 0 and 1s to be lost along the way, which could result in some nice choppiness in what you're seeing/hearing. Very not cool. Same goes for the end connections; if they're not made well enough, then they don't do you any good, because they can't get a good enough connection to be reliable. But shielding on a digital source cable is NOT needed for signal quality.

That being said, though, I don't spend big $$ on cables alone. I've found that surprisingly, RCA makes some very well made cables for the money, if you have to have analog cables. Thiers are about 1/3rd the cost of Monster cables, and if you slice 'em open, you'll see that they have comperable shielding. You don't have to spend big $$ on cables, but you do have to make sure whatever cable you're getting is of good enough quality, that the ends will make a good connection, and that the cable itsself won't break/fray on the inside. Quality *usually* comes with more $$, but not always.

Good rule of thumb is expect to spend around 10% of your system costs in cables. So if you've got a $6,000 setup, expect to spend around $600 for all the cables hooking up the parts. Then again, I'm cheap, and only have about 5% into cables... I shop around to get good prices.. For instance, I paid ONLY $35 for my Monster HDMI to DVI cable to hook up the HD box... If you're careful and patient, you can find some extremely good prices...