First Look: We Test Toshiba's First HD-DVD Player

[suppafreak]

If anyone interested here is the link.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20060418/tc_pcworld/125431

So far I am not impressed.

[ROF]

I'm not impressed either. Of course, I am not looking at an HD-DVD future.

[rumplestiltskin]

HD-DVD & BluRay: The answers to a question no one has asked.

[j1d10t]

Doesn't sound all that great. It sounds more like they are releasing these before the technology is really ready

HD-DVD & BluRay: The answers to a question no one has asked.

[lordsmurf]

HD-DVD & BluRay: The answers to a question no one has asked.

That's the best description I've heard to date.

[Baldrick]

I want it now!!! so I can rent 720p/1080p movies...DVD looks like crap on my 720p projector.

[oldandinthe way]

HD images of crappy movies will not be successful.

[tgm4883]

HD-DVD & BluRay: The answers to a question no one has asked.

HD-DVD & BluRay: Because we were running out of ways of making money off of Star Wars, LOTR, Matrix trilogy, etc.

[dvdguy4]

Its to big. Reminds me of the old school beta-max and vhs players I had in grade school.

[j1d10t]

HD images of crappy movies will not be successful.

Exactly! An HD version of a crappy movie will not make the movie any less crappy..... :P

What I want to know is: What comes after HD? Super HD? Very HD? HD-2? Extreme HD?

And all of these features they talk about.... I'll bet less than 2% of movies will use them.

From the article:
"For example, an actor can appear on-screen above the movie and give his comments on the current scene being shown."

Isn't the idea of an "audio" commentary the fact that it's just the audio? Do we really need to see the actor talk about a scene? I know I don't. As it is, I'll bet less than half of DVD watchers bother to listen to the audio commentaries on the DVD.

I remember reading an article a few months ago that said about 1 out of every 5 HDTV owners have the proper set-up to "fully appreciate the quality of" HD-DVD, or Blu-Ray. 1 in 5. And they expect these to really sell? I guess we don't really need to "fully appreciate" them, just buy them

[JoeTheDude]

What I want to know is: What comes after HD? Super HD? Very HD? HD-2? Extreme HD?

I wouldn't be suprised if they came up with something along the lines of "X-Treme HD" or "Real HD" (ie; un-compressed) HD on one of those holographic disks...

[FulciLives]

I want it now!!! so I can rent 720p/1080p movies...DVD looks like crap on my 720p projector.

I was reading a thread over at the AVS FORUM about the Toshiba HD-DVD player ...

Those with 720p displays said that it looked better when the player was set to output 1080i and their display "downsized" to 720p instead of outputing 720p directly from the player.

That makes no sense but some tried to explain it in this way ... supposedly (some? ... all?) 720p displays are really 768p so when you feed it 720p the display has to "upsize" to 768p and that causes more problems than feeding it a higher resolution (like 1080i) and letting the display unit "downsize" to 720p/768p.

All I know is that I wish the HDTV I bought this past Christmas could support 1080p instead of just 1080i but then again a 1080p display would have been WAY out of my price range.

I want to get some sort of HDTV DVD format but I am waiting for now to see how things "play out" although I must say I have high hopes for the Sony PS3 yet I have never been an "early" adopter of a video game system (I always wait for the price to come down a bit). I am more interested in the Sony PS3 for game play but hey ... it will be a Blue Ray movie player as well so ...

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Bob W]

Here is a much more informed review of the Toshiba player. http://www.dvdtown.com/article/reviewofthetoshibahd-a1hd-dvdp/3255/

Oh and I have seen the player in action and the HD-DVD trailer of King Kong is absolutely surreal, almost 3D imo. I have a player on order it's a bargin at $500 considering it sports an Intel 2.5 Ghz processor and 1GB of 333MHz DDR.

[Radixmind]

Don't buy into any HD product. Wait. These companies need your money much more than you need to see Tom Hank's individual nostril hairs.

weirdly, i believe that, if the prices of HD kit and discs DONT tumble in the first few years, as is being predicted by those who are seeing it happen with DVD, then it might be a good thing. i might mean that the industry doesnt have a 'new wave' of just-slightly-better-than-HD technology waiting in the wings, like they did with DVD, and that Hi-Def really IS the pinnacle of image quality acheivement.

but i suspect not.

[RottenFoxBreath]

Here is a much more informed review of the Toshiba player. http://www.dvdtown.com/article/reviewofthetoshibahd-a1hd-dvdp/3255/

Oh and I have seen the player in action and the HD-DVD trailer of King Kong is absolutely surreal, almost 3D imo. I have a player on order it's a bargin at $500 considering it sports an Intel 2.5 Ghz processor and 1GB of 333MHz DDR.

hells bells,that looks awful..like a 70s throwback..
and its noise is a factor too..hehe,sure there will be some complaint about that..
well all be deaf soon from fans on tvs,360s,ps3s,HD-dvd players and pcs.
all houses will sound like wind tunnels,and be super dusty to boot.

[robertazimmerman]

How ironic that after waiting SO long for good video quality to appear, many of us now need glasses in order not to see a blurry screen.

r

[web_maven]

Blue-ray or HD-DVD I will tell you who will win.


The winner is neither!

I read an article that China is making an HD format (Based on HD-DVD) I believe they will win. The main reason, they will sell the HD-DVD player for sub $100.00 and the quality will be as good as the others without all the macorvision codes or at least a way to disable the codes so people can make backups.

It will not be the quality that decides who wins (e.g. VHS vs. Beta) it will be price!

I am telling you PRICE will be the winner. Think about it, if you have people going out and buying DVD players for $50.00 and they work well and you don't need super TVs to see the quality then why would anyone go out and spend $800.00 we are talking the mass market not the Video Crazy Tech geeks

I will not by any of them until I see a trend at Wal-Mart or the video store and I have the HDTV at home.

Just my 2 cents

[handyguy]

I think that they waited too long because now you can get a HD cheaper per gig than those disks. Future could be HDs instead of disks?

[Seeker47]

Isn't the idea of an "audio" commentary the fact that it's just the audio? Do we really need to see the actor talk about a scene? I know I don't. As it is, I'll bet less than half of DVD watchers bother to listen to the audio commentaries on the DVD.:

Much less than that, I'd say, for most movies. Just for the sake of argument, let's say the movie is a good one, you happen to be interested in the commentary, and the commentators have interesting things to say. Why do they always have to do this the same way, which forces you to watch the whole movie a 2nd. time. Which you probably don't want to invest the time for, particularly if you just watched it. Why can't they key in on particular scenes or production elements for the commentary, be relatively concise about it, and leave it at that ? That 30 minute occasional series on Sundance Channel, where they analyze the most important aspects behind-the-scenes on a particular film, might be the best example of what I'm talking about.

[FulciLives]

I consider myself a big movie fan and have read countless magazine articles and books about this movie or that movie or this director and his movies etc. but I find that I rarely listen to audio commentaries.

I do however enjoy watching documentaries on the DVD about the making of the movie especially when it centers around interviews with a variety of cast members and best if it is not only those on the screen in the movie but also those behind the scenes. It is even more exciting when it is a recent interview of an actor for an old movie as you get to see what that actor looks like now as opposed to 20 years ago when he was in the film. That's kinda neat especially for seldom seen actors.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[RabidDog]

the problem with all the on-disc commentarys is that they are all going to be good.. at least twenty years later and on tv you can hear the truth.. about brandos weight problem, sheens heart attack.. the mob involvement.. the juice you want to hear..

[yoda313]

I still think the recordable market will be where these two next gen formats will really shine. I know if it comes down in price I'd be tempted to get the recorder and player just so I wouldn't have to spend hours downconverting hdtv .tp files to dvd specs. I would love to just take the file and author it like a good old mpeg 2 file.

Now thats where Bluray will probably kill hddvd. If you can get more gigs on a disc like they can you can use higher bitrates and store more content. That will determine the eventual winner at least in the recordable market in my opinion.

Plus look at it this way - how many 70 minute cdr's are still out there? Hardly any because they are mostly 80 minute cdr's. Now if those were competing formats the 70 minute would have died out fast because people want longer recording time. Thats one of the things that hurt beta was vhs could record longer. Now it looks like sony learned from that lesson and made the bluray capacity higher than hddvd.

[mattyboy]

Here is a much more informed review of the Toshiba player. http://www.dvdtown.com/article/reviewofthetoshibahd-a1hd-dvdp/3255/

Oh and I have seen the player in action and the HD-DVD trailer of King Kong is absolutely surreal, almost 3D imo. I have a player on order it's a bargin at $500 considering it sports an Intel 2.5 Ghz processor and 1GB of 333MHz DDR.

hells bells,that looks awful..like a 70s throwback..
and its noise is a factor too..hehe,sure there will be some complaint about that..
well all be deaf soon from fans on tvs,360s,ps3s,HD-dvd players and pcs.
all houses will sound like wind tunnels,and be super dusty to boot.

It looks so big because its got the same feature compatibility as a decent HT reciever. Included the often overlooked 5.1 analog inputs. Not too many dvd players have those. Plus a LAN jack, etc etc quite a few connections. And its still smaller than a HT receiver (not the panasonic digital ones) but the rest of the bunch.

[CubDukat]

I saw one of Toshiba's players at Best Buy doing a demo of Serenity, and I'n not sure whether it was because the display wasn't calibrated or Serenity was a bad transfer (which I doubt, since all the reviews crowed about its visual quality), but HD-DVD isn't exactly blowing my skirts up.

I think I'll wait until the second wave of titles hits; maybe they'll have either refined their encoding by then or there'll be better software that shows off what the format's capable of. Hopefully by then they'll also have HDMI 1.3-capable audio receivers. But right now I see no reason to go for either format--especially not Blu-Ray, since I'm still on an anti-Sony rant.

I don't know why they thought they had to rush either format out the door, personally; I don't think enough people own HDTV to make it worth it--not to mention the dearth of titles. They've had more than enough time to have enough titles ready for launch, and to work out any quality issues with the hardware and the software, so if both formats were to fall right on their collective asses, I wouldn't miss them.

Don't these people learn anything? Has Sony forgotten about all its other failures--Elcaset, Betamax, MiniDisc, SDDS--you get the idea, right?