I received the 609 and the 809 and did some testing over the weekend. Both of these were advertised on eBay as "no sound" issue.
809 - works exactly as I theorized, the audio is dead but the video portion works perfectly
609 - completely dead, powers on but no audio or video
This means that purchasing a cheap "no sound" one is a gamble. My thought is that someone tried to repair the 609 I have by reflowing the chip but overheated it and killed the HDMI board entirely but I cannot know for sure. Once I get the 709 in I will have a better idea of the odds of getting one that works for video. I guess the wildcard will always be did the unit get shelved when it stopped working or did someone just say heck with it and indiscriminately fire up the board hoping to fix it? I know the 809 I have was just shelved per the owner, no amateur repairs attempted.
As far as picture quality goes so far 809 is top notch. I use MadVR Envy for upscaling so that does not really matter to me so much but if someone wants an all in one solution to go from 480i composite input to 1080p HDMI output the 809 would be a really good solution. Onkyo vs Kramer 773 for comb filtering would be the same but for deinterlacing Onkyo (HQV Vida) may have a slight edge and for upscaling I think Onkyo has a clear advantage. I am not a huge fan of the Kramer, to me it is more of a presentation device than one designed specifically for home theater. We don't really know what processor Kramer is using, we do know Onkyo 809 is using HQV Vida.
I did some comparisons of 480p output vs 1080p output vs 1080i output on the Onkyo and on my specific setup I will choose between 1080p and 1080i. The Envy picks quality of algorithms according to available GPU power and 480p60 -> 4k60 is very GPU intensive so if I can send it 1080p60 to start I end up with higher quality results (because Envy can use better algorithms and HQV Vida is doing a good job from 480p - 1080p). The Envy also has AI based motion adaptive deinterlacing (described as similar to Faroudja DCDI but using AI) which is really good so 1080i from the Onkyo may be a good compromise to take a little of the workload off of Envy but still allow it to shine with what it does best.
Onkyo 4k output is a no go for LD, it can only do 4k24, 4k25, or 4k30 so unless you can feed it a 24p signal its no good. There is no way to IVTC LD in real time nor can the Onkyo do any sort of frame blending to force film mode onto the 480i60 LD signal.
More to come, hopefully I get a working 709 and can see how that does with upscaling (no HQV Vida in the mid range 709).
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