Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD Player
HD-DVD is the real deal
Trust me, you'll be saying the same after watching HD-DVD. The Toshiba player itself is very good overall. Build quality is great, it's built like a tank, strong chassis and Made in Japan. <br />I do have a gripe with 2 things about this player. The first is the remote control, overall it's really bad. It's too long, buttons are too small and no backlight. However, a universal learning remote fixed that problem.The second problem is the loading time of the player. It takes about one minute from turning it on, loading it up and playing the disc. However, recent firmware upgrades have reduced boot time by about 15 seconds, I'm assuming that future firmware upgrades will further reduce boot and loading times. <br /> <br />Firmware upgrades are made via the onboard LAN connection. You just plug the player to the internet, make sure the internet settings of the player are correct and click for an upgrade and it downloads and installs the firmware in about 30-45 mins. If you cannot connect to the internet for some reason such as an internet connection not being available in your home theatre room you can just mail in a card that comes with the HD-DVD player for free firmware upgrade CD's to be received in the mail whenever they are available, or you can call Toshiba's excellent customer service and they will take down your information and send you the firmware upgrade discs. <br /> <br />Picture quality is the biggest improvement. Colours and flesh tones are much more realistic, the picture is sharp my TV's sharpness is turned off for HD-DVD and it's still VERY sharp and the detail is very fine and distinguishable. <br /> <br />Sound quality is very much improved. Dolby Digital Plus makes the soundtrack of a movie more powerful, clear and more discrete/directional. I recommend using the 5.1 analog connections for DD+ because using optical/coaxial output down converts the signal to DTS. <br /> <br />Finally, the biggest reason to buy this player, the price. For a new technology and first generation player, this player is a great value. Unlike the Samsung Blu-Ray player which is $1000, has many problems and video quality that is sub par (due to single layer discs using an old compression codec in MPEG2) with no extras on Blu-Ray movies. HD-DVD movies cost a tad bit more than new release DVD's and it's one of the reason's why I am suddenly upgrading a chunk of my library. <br /> <br />Trust me, you will not regret this purchase, I certainly didn't.