The boxing day sale price was great plus I sold my Yamaha to help pay the difference. I've only had it hooked up for a week and so far so good. Now I have 4 HDMI inputs and one output for the TV so there's way less wires back there and the install looks cleaner.
There's quite a few great features. The autosetup is relatively easy, the manual isn't exactly clear but I figured it out. The audessey mic takes readings from up to 6 different positions. Nice touch is that it has a mount to fasten to a tripod for stability. I love the ability to rename inputs, I did just that with the media player. Also nice is the ability to shut off inputs that are unused such as tape, phono, ipod.... no need to flip through them every time you want to change functions. And icing on the cake, being able to progam the initial volume when the amp is turned on. I've set it to -40dB so it won't blare if we watched a movie really loud last night.
I've always had Yamaha's but the deal was good enough to switch. Let's see how the Denon holds up over a few years.