Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD Player
Toshiba HD-DVD has superior video codec  vs. Samsung Blue Ray.
It has been a few days 22 June 2006 since the Samsung Blue Ray player has been available.  I wanted to see it first before jumping at the Toshiba HD-DVD which has been out a few months.  I have now seen both in action.  True, they were not side by side and had differnt monitor and different titles.  But initial impression and later confirmed after 15 minutes of viewing...is that even though the Blue Ray specs look superior on paper...Toshiba HD-DVD has much better picture quality.  I think that is becuase Hd-DVD uses a next-generation video compression codec, while Blue Ray uses old and tired MPEG-2 codec.  The next question is whether there is any reason to wait to buy a rumored \\"universal\\" player that would play both formats...I don't think so.   As a bonus feature I will relay that over on audio visual science forum avsforum there are rich individuals that have actually purchased both the HD-DVD and Blue ray and have reached the same conclusion.  Frankly, I'm stunned.  The fact that Blue Ray outputs 1080P (which many monitors don't accept) while HD-DVD outputs 1080i is irrelevant.  The fact that Blue Ray has higher raw volume storage capacity is irrelevant.  This is because HD-DVD looks like it has a video codec algorithim processing that is 200% more efficient than MPEG-2 on blue Ray.   Amazing.