Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD Player
Excellent HD Picture
I bought this player about a week ago. The picture on standard DVD's is great. The picture on HD-DVD's is awesome! I bought 5 HD movies when I purchased this player. \\"Perfect Storm\\",\\"Training Day\\",\\"Apollo 13\\",\\"Million Dollar Baby\\" and \\"Cinderella Man\\". The picture on all of these movies is incredible! The sound is also great. My player is hooked up to a 42 inch Panasonic plasma via an HDMI cable. My receiver is a Harman Kardon 240. If you hook up the sound using a fiber optic cable the sound is down converted to DTS. If you use the analog connections the sound comes across in Dolby Digital Plus. I'm using both connections. The sound of the DTS is louder because it's a digital signal, but the Dolby Digital Plus is clearer. It's sounds more like the sounds you'll hear at a real movie theater. Sometimes I watch movies using DTS, other times I'll use the Dolby Digital Plus. Both sound great. I was going to buy a Blu-Ray player but after reading lots of reviews and doing some research, I decided that the price tag on the Samsung Blu-Ray player was just too much. I haven't seen the picture on the Blu-Ray, but I bet that it's nothing like the Toshiba. The only concern I had when purchasing this player was the support of the movie studios. Blu-Ray has the support of most of the major studios. HD-DVD is basically only supported by Warner Brothers and Universal. Hopefully if HD-DVD continues to gain consumer support, more of the studios will switch sides. Nobody knows which format will win out, but even if HD-DVD loses out you'll have a high end DVD player that only cost 499.99 dollars. Buy this player. You won't regret it.