Todd,
If video quality is more important to you than sound, the 981 has a slight edge over the 980, but only IF you are going to use the player’s video processor. If your receiver has a better video processor than the 981, then your best option would be to go with the 980 and output 480i / HDMI to the receiver.
Only time will tell how well the 3808 performs with video processing. Pure speculation on my part, but I doubt the 3808 will do better than the 981.
Sound quality is also dependant on other variables. The most obvious, is the user’s audio processor. If your processor is HDMI v1.2 or 1.3 and can process that audio stream, then the 980 will be your best choice. In addition to the 980’s SEVEN channel analogue outputs (which is a rarity in itself), the 980 is the only SACD player besides a Pioneer SACD player (that is only available in Japan) that can output raw DSD via HDMI to an audio processor with HDMI 1.2a or 1.3 (that can also process DSD audio streams). To explain this in a different way, seeing how you are a photographer; consider DSD as a RAW image file and PCM as a JPEG. Until this 980, all SACD players that have HDMI output would convert the DSD (Raw) information pulled off the disk to PCM (Jpeg) and send it to the audio processor. With the 980, your getting the whole data stream to the processor, so in theory, there should be a significant improvement is sound quality. Not having heard one myself, I can not confirm this, but there’s a large group of audiophiles that are pretty excited over this.
