***Official HD-DVD Player Thread*** (1 Viewer)

[Steven Simon]

Got my player at BB on Sunday... So far I have Last Samerai., Goodfellas, Apollo 13, and tonight I picked up Training Day.... Image quality is stunning... I'm using HDMI running through my Outlaw 990 DVI Swicthing... I also run mt Denon 2910 DVD through that as well.....

The 1080i Full res imgage aside, I just love the new intuitive menus... The overlaying ontop of the playing movies makes navigation a snap!!!

 

[Rob_HD]

Got my A1 last week.

I just don't know how to describe what I have found over the last few days.

Stunning only begins to explain. I had expected the HD picture to be good, sure, but I had no idea just how much better "good" could be!

There is something almost completely different about the picture. I have seen some really good prerecorded stuff from my DVHS library, and this exceeds them.

Not only is the picture very sharp and crisp, with a lot of contrast, and good blacks - but the COLOR is something I had NEVER known could improve like this.

It's not oversaturated, that would not be the right word, it's just BIG - HUGE range, yet in looking at the skin tones, they are perfect, smooth, detailed, almost like a large-format photographic slide.

My DVHS was never able to present such a huge impression of color and contrast range. I think maybe this just has to be something to do with the VC1 used by the movies on these discs, compared to the Mpeg 2 on the DVHS.

"Stunning" also applies to the VALUE. The SD DVD upscaling on this player is phenomenal! I had seen a couple reports from users that the upscaling was very good, but I had taken it with a pinch of salt, as I really didn't see how they could do it at this price.

Well I've put the salt back in the cupboard. Subjectively, this is the best picture I've ever seen from SD DVDs. Beats my Denon 5900 and 2910 outright. Objectively, I've thrown my library of test discs at at and it only failed ONE TEST.

The test it failed was on the HQV test disc, where a 24 film source is mixed with a 30 fps video titling overlay, and the titling became jagged. This is irrelevant for DVDs anyway, as you'll only see this situation on broadcast, not film based DVD movies.

Everything else passed - caramba!

Stunning also applies to the audio - the DD+ is very, very nice. I got a Denon 2807 last week to use with this player, so that I can use the HDMI, which is the best way. I would have chosen analog as a second choice.

I am seeing 96/24 coming in to the AVR, which is confusing me a bit, since I thought that the audio on the discs were mostly 48/16. I have a friend with a Chord DAC64, which upconverts CDs to hi res audio. He came over when I raised this with him and poked at the A1. His view is that the A1 is upsampling the audio to 96/24, and that it sounds like it also! He was quite impressed with the sound.

Can anyone verify this?

All in all, I am just flabbergasted by this machine. For $500 I was hoping to get great Hi Def movies, not much more. I have gotten amazing hi def movies and a lot more.

I cannot think of a single home theatre purchase I have ever made that comes anywhere near being as good a buy as this one.

Sorry to make such a long post as my first but I just had to say it.

As far as what some of the folks have said on this forum, I'm having a hard time agreeing.

I got 6 movies with the player and I have played all of them in the last few days. Nothing has gone wrong at all. No freezes, no hangups, nada. No HDMI issues either, which is odd, because according to some,this happens everytime it is turned on. All I can say is that I can MAKE the HDMI error come on if I want to, all you do is turn the A1 on without being plugged into a TV, or if the TV is off.

As far the slow operation, it does take a while to power up - I timed it at 25 seconds, and a few more to start playing. I think most of the delay is while it figures out exactly what kind of disc is in the tray.

Once you get past the startup, operation is very snappy. VERY snappy. This shocked me, because it is a real contrast to the slow startup. Every press I made on the remote, ie. Pause, fast forward, chapter skip, has an instantaneous response.

Play and eject are slower. But the eject on my 5900 takes forever also, same with the 2910.

If you choose the advanced menus while the movies are playing, they appear so quickly that I didn't even realize they weren't there before - seriously, just "poof" and they were up. I think the reason they intruded so little are that they appear in the black space at the bottom of the movie.

I'm still learning the player and messing with more stuff. So these are my impressions after just a week on my SRXD Sony RPTV.

HIGHLY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - I just can't say enough about how pleasantly surprised I am with this purchase.

EDIT - I am running the unit in 1080i mode. As far as I can tell this is the best, no question. When 720p is selected, it appears that the unit actually downscales to 540p, then back up to 720p. At least this is what it looks like from the material I've tried.

 

[Shawn.F]

Boy, after a lousy commute in this morning, that was great stuff to read there, Rob. Thanks! I am going to hunt around for my A1 next week.

 

[Paul_Scott]

I would still have to rate my Ascend speakers ($150 each) as my best bang for the buck HT purchase so far (going on 4 yrs now), but this player is certainly close behind. And the speakers have never sounded as good as they do now.

I've had mine just over a week and no lock-ups, errors, etc
at one point I couldn't seem to get the repeat button to engage, but it seems to work fine these last couple of days now.

I was hesitant about laying down $500 until I kept hearing it was 'safe'.
and I still had a little remorse for a couple days afterward 'cause I know how slow the rollout of titles will be this first year. I didn't even take it out of the box for two days, just in case i got cold feet and wanted to return it. But now that I have it in the system, I'm thrilled. $500 seems like a steal for it at this point.

 

[Sami Kallio]

Got my player yesterday and hooked it up today. Lots of noise in the picture and the difference between 1080i and 480i isn't as much as one would expect. My projector is only 720p but tonight I will get to test it with my new 1080p TV, maybe there will be more difference with the added resolution.

 

[Dave H]

Some is definitely wrong with your set-up if you are seeing ANY noise at all and not seeing a huge difference between 480i and 1080i. Make sure your Toshiba is set to 1080i and not 720p and many people have mistakenly been doing.

 

[Sami Kallio]

Nothing wrong with the setup, the noise is there. It was there when I viewed the player at Fry's, it was there as expected when I got it home. Look at the background on HD movies, compression most likely is making it very noisy.

Difference between 480i and 1080i is there, just not as much as one would expect. It's not as much to make regular DVD's obsolete and unwatchable until the HD version of the movie is available. If it would have been VHS vs. DVD kind of difference I wouldn't bother with DVD's anymore but I don't feel that's the case. So those who can't find a HD player in stock or can't afford one right now, don't worry, you are still more than fine with SD-DVD's.

That being said, yes, I will be keeping the player as it is well worth the price. All the movies that Netflix has on HD I will watch on HD and some movies I will wait to get on HD rather than watch on SD but at the same time I will not shy away from watching movies on SD now that I have a HD player.

 

[Dave H]

What you might be seeing is inherent source film grain - not compression.

I have an extremely well-calibrated, ISF'd Sony KP-57WS520 and I have seen NO digital artifacts on any of the six HD DVDs I've viewed. I see ZERO noise, nor do most of the countless number of users on AVS.

I find the difference between SD and HD DVD dramatic in all cases; even phenomenal in some cases. Again, I've only viewed six movies at this point and I'm highly impressed with each one. Admittingly, slightly older films (Apollo 13 and Goodfellas, for example) don't give the "WOW" effect as much --- however, there is still a big difference compared to SD. "Newer" movies such as Million Dollar Baby, Serenity, and Swordfish, for example, just blow me away.

I agree SD still looks good. But, HD DVD just looks so much better. It would certainly feel strange going to back to watching the SD titles I mentioned above after seeing the HD DVD versions.

 

[Sami Kallio]

Well, I just got my 1080p set and moved the HD-DVD to play on it. Now there is a much bigger difference, 720p just didn't do justify. Shit, I might have to dismantle my dedicated HT room and start watching movies in my bedroom...

 

[Levesque]

HD-DVD player now playing at my place with a Gennum VXP scaler (to de-interlace 1080i) to Sony Ruby VPL-VW100 at 1080p (native resolution).

And this paired with an Anthem D2 with HDMI 1.1, and the new audio formats passing through one cable only.

This HD-DVD player is well worth the price, and HD is SOOOO much better then 480i, it's not even funny. If people don't see "that much of a difference", it's the video chain that is the problem, and not the Toshiba player.

I can't believe the difference in PQ. Night-and-day in my case. Wow. The Sony Ruby was definitely made for HD.

 

[TonyD]

does this have a zoom mode?

i'm so used to my pan rp91 auto zoom non enhanced that when i put a non enhanced in the xa1 it was window boxed, bars all the way around.

 

[Sami Kallio]

Well, the Samsung HL-R that I got is definately not the weak link in this chain but the LCD projector in my HT is. I agree on the Sony, it does have an amazing PQ. HD-DVD format (compression) and film transfer really are the weak links with those displays.

After watching few SD-DVD's on my Samsung with the Toshiba player I have to say it does a wonderful job with them. Sure HD is better but on most scenes it is not night and day. Now, if we would get 1920x1080 all the way from the source and uncompressed, that would be a different case.

 

[Larry Sutliff]

Tony, there is a zoom mode, but it makes the picture 2x normal, so it's basically a waste. I kept my Zenith upconverting player for non anamorphic material because it has a wonderful stretch mode that will fill the screen at whatever size you want.

 

[Mike~Sileck]

Thinking about buying my father one of these for fathers day.

He would use it on one of two tv's. One has a DVI, so that should be no problem. The other is a VGA style input (its a commercial grade plasma). We're currently using component to vga cables for the plasma now. Are there HDMI > VGA cables out there, and will they do everything as if it were DVI or HDMI?

Please let me know, and if there are any questions, please ask.

Really would appreciate a quick reply .. thinking about buying it on Friday evening.

Thanks SO much!!

Mike

 

[Sami Kallio]

You can use the component cables with this player, no problem. I just got HDMI cables a few days ago so I haven't had time to do a/b comparison but even if there is a difference it's not much. Only thing it will not do with component is upconvert some SD-DVD discs w/ copy protection (I have only read about this, all the DVD's I played with component were upconverted to 1080i so I am not sure how true it is).

 

[Scotty_McW]

While I was wandering through Best Buy on my lunch yesterday, I decided to check to see if they had any HD players in stock. I've been missing it ever since my XA1 died. To my surprise they had one A1 and it was sitting with the regualr DVD players.

I couldn't resist the temptation so I'm now on my second player. Two movies in (Constantine & Van Helsing) and so far it runs better than my XA1 ever did. This weekend I'm going to try the firmware upgrade, but so far things are looking pretty rosy for the new player!

 

[JohnS]

Well, I suppose I should talk about my experience.

I recently bought a Samsung 50' DLP 1080P and a HD DVD player, the Toshiba HD-A1.

I have had the HD DVD player for almost two weeks now, and I can happily say that I have REALLY enjoyed my HD DVD player.

I've had ZERO problems, probally since my DVD player had the new firmware installed before shipment.

Picture is outstanding, the Dolby UNcompressed sound is great.

I own four movies right now( Serenity, Swordfish, Bourne Supremacy and Constantine) I'm looking foward to more HD DVD's in the next few months, as I can't seem to get enough now.

New menu navagation is a breeze.