Onkyo TX-NR818

Onkyo TX-NR818 Review

Onkyo's TX-NR818 comes packed to the gills with features and power to spare, futureproofing it against just about any home theater upgrade.A/V receivers have become so powerful and feature rich over the last few years that upgrade decisions have become increasingly difficult to justify. But if you have a large collection of DVDs or use services like Netflix or Vudu to stream movies from the cloud, the HQV Vida and Marvell Qdeo video processors alone make an upgrade to Onkyo's TX-NR818 a worthwhile investment. The THX Select2 Plus-certified TX-NR818 receiver does a fantastic job of upscaling standard-definition to not just 1080p, but all the way to 4K (that's resolution of either 3840 by 2160 pixels or 4096 by 2160 pixels, depending on the display that's attached). We weren't able to test the 4K resolution—LG's 84-inch 84LM9600 and Sony's recently announced XBR-84 900 are the only TVs on the market that meet that spec right now, and they both cost upward of $22,000 —but upscaled video looked spectacular on the 55-inch Panasonic Viera TC-55LE54 in our home theater.