A reasonable question, Jacob.
Firstly, the 2900 or the 2910 will be considerably less than $1000 ($419 -$600), though that still is a fair amount of money.
Secondly the HD players won't be coming out until the end of the year, and when they do they will be prohibitively expensive. It'll take at least another year or two for the prices to come down to affordable levels. So, realistically, the absolute earliest I could even start thinking about one will be two years, and I suspect it will probably be longer before I can actually get one.
Thirdly, there initially will be the inevitable format war (blu-ray vs. HD DVD). It would seem prudent to wait until one of them surfaces as the dominant format. No fun to spend a big chunk of dough on a player that quickly becomes obsolete. Although, like the SACD vs. DVD-A war, this one could go on for a long time. No telling how long it will be until players are released that play both formats.
And, of course the 1080p HDTV sets are coming out too, so there is a LOT of money to be spent. Time to get saving!
