Quick Review: First HD-DVD player
May 15th, 2006, By Ovi Demetrian Jr
The first HD DVD player, the Toshiba HD-A1, is now more widely available and we just got ours last week. We ended up getting a defective unit initially, so things didn’t look so good initially. We replaced it a couple days later though I was pleasantly surprised.
If you’ve seen any initial reviews, you would know that turning on the device is a sslllooowww proccess. This is because the device is basically a computer, so it takes time to ‘boot up’. You kind of get used to it after a while though and everything else is pretty responsive afterward.
A seemingly big issue is that it’s only 1080i, not the expected ‘True HD’ 1080p. I was dissapointed at first, until I read this ProjectorCentral article which compares the formats and sums it up nicely:
“After hours of viewing three different HD-DVD movies there is simply no evidence of any artifact that might be attributed to the fact that the signal was transmitted in 1080i format.”
The most important thing to keep in mind is the reason the HD DVDs are such a big deal and that is the picture quality. It truly looks impressive and probably as perfect as our eyes can handle. After watching a movie with it, I found it hard to go back to a regular DVD movie.
If you’ve been watching broadcast HDTV and figure it’s going to be the same, the truth is that it’s much better. There is no noise or compression artifacts and the movement is much smoother.
So is it worth getting? For someone that can’t wait to get the latest technology and has a nice home entertainment system, definetly. For everyone else, wait until around the end of the year when we have a better idea of how the HD DVD/Blu-Ray format war is going to decide which one to go with.
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