You may be looking at something of a dark horse.

With this year's spotlight firmly fixed on Onkyo's fabulous TX-SR605, a lot of people will completely miss Denon's AVR-2308. That's a bit of a shame, because our Hot Deal of just £499 puts the 2308 into the same sort of price bracket as the all-conquering 605. Of course it is still true to say that even at that price, the 2308 costs a hefty £100 more than its rival, and it's also true to say that the 2308 loses out badly by not being fully compliant with True HD sound.

However, the Denon does have one advantage over the Onkyo, in that it boasts a 1080p video scaler. This means that all visual inputs can be upscaled to 1080p, ready to be fed to one of the new generation of TVs or projectors. That isn't strictly necessary if you're already running HD sources (e.g. upscaling DVD player or PS3), but it still may be of use to some people. In addition, the 2308 has got all the usual bells and whistles, 2 HDMI in, 7 x 100 watts, full iPod connectivity etc - so it's actually a lot of amp for the money.