The Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity website has gotten hold of the $500 dollar Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD player for benchmarking purposes. For those results, you can visit the site with the link provided later and get an idea of how well they think this player stacks up against other standard definition players for DVD. That's right, they did their testing using good old DVD! Interesting indeed!
But anyway, in case you want to know what this first generation player offers in respect of an end user experience, check out this conclusion.
| Conclusions I plan on doing a full report on this player in the next few weeks and will include my full impressions on HD-DVD playback including subjective impressions of both video and audio. As an SD-DVD player, the HD-A1 could be a lot better. I've said it too many times now; the operability of the player is a big part of the whole experience, and the HD-A1 has a long way to go in this regard. While I don't expect a first generation player to be perfect, I do expect better than this. The HD-A1 just feels rushed, and I haven't even gone into the issues I've found on the HD-DVD side. While I am excited about the future of video in our homes, due to the horrible operability of this player and other issues that I will go into further in the full review, I can't recommend the HD-A1 as a SD or HD DVD player right now. I can't help but think this would be a very short term investment and this format will see better players long before this format really takes off. As a standard DVD player it is the best yet from Toshiba from a video processing standpoint, but its a big step back in every other department. |
Ouch! But, this is good to know. Lets face it, you will definately be using these new high def players for DVD as well, or at least until you have a library of HD-DVD to rifle through. So it's important to know how the hardware reacts to user input.
On the bright side, as they say above, this thing does a great job displaying the DVD video at 480p and of course it is capable of 720p and 1080i as well. So, for the rest of the article- head on over to this page.
