Reverb2009
Well-known member
That’s right lady and gentlemen, Toshiba’s HD-DVD players have launched and are now hitting retailers every ware. I wasn’t going to jump onboard with Toshibas format I was waiting for Sony’s Blu-Ray (and I still am) but at only $500.00 for the HD-A1 and there limited availability I just couldn’t resist picking up the last one from my local BestBuy. Unfortunately I was not able to get an HD-DVD movie with my player because the movies are street dated for this coming Tuesday the 18, some people on the AVSforum have reported there local BestBuys selling the movies early but mine would not budge. There are only three HD-DVD movies launching with the player The Last Samurai, The Phantom of the Opera, and Serenity. So for now, I will just talk about how this player does with standard DVD but on Tuesday when I can get a HD-DVD movie I will update this review with my impressions of what the HD-A1 HD-DVD player can really do.
The HD-A1 is a Tank, it comes in at 17” wide almost 14” deep and 4” high. It does have the Dolby Plus decoder built in and 5.1 analog jacks in the back so you can output the new audio formats to your receiver or pre-amp. It does come with a digital coax and fiber optical out ports, but you can’t send the Dolby plus or DTS-HD audio over digital outs, it will be down rezed. You have to use the analog outs for output the audio, or use HDMI to utilize the new loss less audio formats. There is also a networking port on the back of the player so you can down load software updates and bonus material if studios decide to use it. Being this is a first gen player that will come in handy. Some have reported a problem with sending a down rezed Dolby true single over a digital cable to there pre-amp. It seems the receivers and pre-amps are seeing the Dolby true single as DTS and not Dolby digital. Hopefully an update will come out to fix this?
The remote is 9 ½” long 2” wide and ½” thick. The front is steel and the bottom is plastic, the remote has a good weight to it. It is unfortunately not backlit, so those people that have a front projection setup or like to watch movies in the dark will find the remote useless, or will have to turn on a light to use it. The directional pad is OK, but not very responsive, you will find yourself pushing up several times to navigate menus.
Setting up the players menus was striate forward, but to exit out of the menus you have to hit the “setup” button, problem is I could not find a button marked Setup on the remote? There is menu, top menu, V. output, audio but not setup? There is one button on the top that is unmarked but it appears to do nothing? I did finally find it; it was under a hidden sliding panel on the bottom of the remote (very handy, thanks Toshiba).
Playing back standard DVD’s.
The Toshiba HD-A1 can up convert your standard DVD’s to 720P or 1080i if you wish, but you can’t send out 480i over HDMI, if you were thinking about using this player with and external scalier to up convert your movies. Movie quality is very good, colors are bright and crisp, I do see some jittering when the camera pans across the screen that I don’t see with my Pioneer Elite DV-59Avi. I watched Disney’s movie “The Greatest game ever played” on both the DV-59Avi and the HD-A1, all and all the HD-A1 did do a grate job with Standard DVD’s, but the Pioneer was better.
It was the audio side of this player that let me down. There is not much depth to the sound, I found the sound stage to be laid back and veiled, bass was good but not in the same league as the DV-59Avi. The casual listener will be fine with it but Audiophiles should not expect anything mind blowing.
Video wise I rate my Pionner at a 9 and its audio a high 7 to low 8.
I would rate the HD-A1’s Standard DVD Video a high 7 to low 8, and Audio an average 5.
Depending on your current DVD player, you may find the HD-A1 better then your existing player. For me the HD-A1 wont replace my Pioneer Elite DV-59Avi but, I never excepted it to. It’s a first generation player that has been rushed to market to beat out Sony’s Blu-Ray, and at times the HD-A1 can feel a little clunky. Considering it’s $500.00 price of admission I am impressed with it, but we will see what this monster can really do when I get my claws on a HD-DVD movie.
Playing Back HD-DVD's
I started my HD-DVD viewing with Warner Brothers “The Last Samurai” staring Tom Cruise. If you have never watched this movie before, I suggest you do so; it is a wonderful movie that I enjoy watching very much and was thrilled to see it as a launch title for Toshibas HD-DVD format. This movie is filled with beautiful backgrounds and wonderful costumes, especially the extremely detailed samurai armor.
When you first place a disk in the HD-A1’s drive it takes about 30 seconds for the disk to boot up, then another 30 or so for it to process the information. Once the HD-DVD disk starts playing it will go into a Warner Brothers welcome to HD-DVD intro, showcasing a number of movie clips for up incoming HD-DVD titles like Batman Begins, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate factory, Harry Potter and the goblet of fire, The Dukes of Hazzard plus more.
The trailer is designed to introduce you to the new menu system. When you start up a disk it no longer go’s to a menu screen, it now boots directly to the movie. Once in the movie you can hit the menu button on the remote and a menu bar will pop up from the bottom of the screen. You can select to pause the movie, go into languages, special features, ETC. Each option on the menu bar will pop up for easy access, and you don’t even have to stop the movie. You can choose to leave the movie running and open up the menu bar, choose a special feature, watch it, and be scent back to the movie when its over. Its fully integrated into the movie.
The video quality in “TLS” was a bit of a roller coaster, one minute its sharp and detailed, the next its soft and dull. The scenes can change in quality, but it doesn’t change the fact the when the video is at its best, it doesn’t look like video but something much closer to real life. The colors are bright and vibrate, and any flaws in the video transfer can be seen here (film grain can easily be seen if you look for it), macro blocking and pixelation was completely absent, the video was very clean and clear.
The backgrounds are what I really enjoyed looking at; the detail that could be seen in the old streets of Japan was amazing. You could see the depth and textures from far distances. The textures on walls and clothes were fantastic; it would make you want to reach out a touch the textures on screen as if it was really there.
I did not have a set of interconnects to try the Dolby True audio (that will come later), but for now I just used the fiber optic port and sent out a down rezed audio single to my pre-amp. It should be noted that there is a bug here; receivers and pre-amps are seeing the down rezed Dolby True single as a DTS single? The audio still works but it is very faint and somewhat difficult to listen to. Warner Brothers has yet to issue a press release but it appears the problem is not with the HD-A1 player, but with the disks themselves. With any luck WB will issue a recall and I can get a new disk to try, we will see.
Conclusion
All and all I am happy with the player, I was expecting more from HD-DVD but at $500.00 MSRP the player does represent a good value, which consumers will find very tempting. The player is not without its flaws, the remote is defiantly clunky to use, and the player can take a wile to boot up a disk, the audio and video performance does fall short of that ultimate AV quality I was looking for. The video was very detailed but lacked that WOW factor I was looking for? There was lots of detail but not that micro fine detail I wanted to see. I was debating if I would keep the player or not, and I think I have decided to keep it, but with the lack of industry support there wont be much of a movie library for a wile.
I like HD-DVD but it wont stop me from getting a Blu-Ray player, I now more then ever believe Blu-Ray will offer the best in video and audio quality, but it will do so at a premium price tag, with any luck the prices will fall quickly once production starts and the release of the PS3, Microsoft is planning a HD-DVD add on drive for the Xbox 360 but is not expected to release till this fall. I personally don’t see either one of these formats failing, I think they will both take off and last for a number of years, the support of the industry is certainly with these formats, the decision of what to do is now up to you.
_________________________________________________________________
UPDATE!
It appears there is a major bug in the player.
HD-DVD disks are encoded at 1080p resolution. If you have a 720p HDTV (and most of us do) you can have the player down scale the video for you to 1280 X 720p. The problem is it appears the player is taking the 1080p video, down scaling it to 540, then scaling it up to 720. Problem is its taking the resolution away, and once its gone, its gone, you can’t put back what is missing, so your getting a 540 resolution image that's rescaled to 720. That’s bad, bad, bad!.
The best thing you can do is output 1080i to your HDTV and let the TV scale the video down to it's native resolution.
Note this is only for HD-DVD disks, Standard DVD’s scaled to 720p are find.
The HD-A1 is a Tank, it comes in at 17” wide almost 14” deep and 4” high. It does have the Dolby Plus decoder built in and 5.1 analog jacks in the back so you can output the new audio formats to your receiver or pre-amp. It does come with a digital coax and fiber optical out ports, but you can’t send the Dolby plus or DTS-HD audio over digital outs, it will be down rezed. You have to use the analog outs for output the audio, or use HDMI to utilize the new loss less audio formats. There is also a networking port on the back of the player so you can down load software updates and bonus material if studios decide to use it. Being this is a first gen player that will come in handy. Some have reported a problem with sending a down rezed Dolby true single over a digital cable to there pre-amp. It seems the receivers and pre-amps are seeing the Dolby true single as DTS and not Dolby digital. Hopefully an update will come out to fix this?
The remote is 9 ½” long 2” wide and ½” thick. The front is steel and the bottom is plastic, the remote has a good weight to it. It is unfortunately not backlit, so those people that have a front projection setup or like to watch movies in the dark will find the remote useless, or will have to turn on a light to use it. The directional pad is OK, but not very responsive, you will find yourself pushing up several times to navigate menus.
Setting up the players menus was striate forward, but to exit out of the menus you have to hit the “setup” button, problem is I could not find a button marked Setup on the remote? There is menu, top menu, V. output, audio but not setup? There is one button on the top that is unmarked but it appears to do nothing? I did finally find it; it was under a hidden sliding panel on the bottom of the remote (very handy, thanks Toshiba).
Playing back standard DVD’s.
The Toshiba HD-A1 can up convert your standard DVD’s to 720P or 1080i if you wish, but you can’t send out 480i over HDMI, if you were thinking about using this player with and external scalier to up convert your movies. Movie quality is very good, colors are bright and crisp, I do see some jittering when the camera pans across the screen that I don’t see with my Pioneer Elite DV-59Avi. I watched Disney’s movie “The Greatest game ever played” on both the DV-59Avi and the HD-A1, all and all the HD-A1 did do a grate job with Standard DVD’s, but the Pioneer was better.
It was the audio side of this player that let me down. There is not much depth to the sound, I found the sound stage to be laid back and veiled, bass was good but not in the same league as the DV-59Avi. The casual listener will be fine with it but Audiophiles should not expect anything mind blowing.
Video wise I rate my Pionner at a 9 and its audio a high 7 to low 8.
I would rate the HD-A1’s Standard DVD Video a high 7 to low 8, and Audio an average 5.
Depending on your current DVD player, you may find the HD-A1 better then your existing player. For me the HD-A1 wont replace my Pioneer Elite DV-59Avi but, I never excepted it to. It’s a first generation player that has been rushed to market to beat out Sony’s Blu-Ray, and at times the HD-A1 can feel a little clunky. Considering it’s $500.00 price of admission I am impressed with it, but we will see what this monster can really do when I get my claws on a HD-DVD movie.
Playing Back HD-DVD's
I started my HD-DVD viewing with Warner Brothers “The Last Samurai” staring Tom Cruise. If you have never watched this movie before, I suggest you do so; it is a wonderful movie that I enjoy watching very much and was thrilled to see it as a launch title for Toshibas HD-DVD format. This movie is filled with beautiful backgrounds and wonderful costumes, especially the extremely detailed samurai armor.
When you first place a disk in the HD-A1’s drive it takes about 30 seconds for the disk to boot up, then another 30 or so for it to process the information. Once the HD-DVD disk starts playing it will go into a Warner Brothers welcome to HD-DVD intro, showcasing a number of movie clips for up incoming HD-DVD titles like Batman Begins, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate factory, Harry Potter and the goblet of fire, The Dukes of Hazzard plus more.
The trailer is designed to introduce you to the new menu system. When you start up a disk it no longer go’s to a menu screen, it now boots directly to the movie. Once in the movie you can hit the menu button on the remote and a menu bar will pop up from the bottom of the screen. You can select to pause the movie, go into languages, special features, ETC. Each option on the menu bar will pop up for easy access, and you don’t even have to stop the movie. You can choose to leave the movie running and open up the menu bar, choose a special feature, watch it, and be scent back to the movie when its over. Its fully integrated into the movie.
The video quality in “TLS” was a bit of a roller coaster, one minute its sharp and detailed, the next its soft and dull. The scenes can change in quality, but it doesn’t change the fact the when the video is at its best, it doesn’t look like video but something much closer to real life. The colors are bright and vibrate, and any flaws in the video transfer can be seen here (film grain can easily be seen if you look for it), macro blocking and pixelation was completely absent, the video was very clean and clear.
The backgrounds are what I really enjoyed looking at; the detail that could be seen in the old streets of Japan was amazing. You could see the depth and textures from far distances. The textures on walls and clothes were fantastic; it would make you want to reach out a touch the textures on screen as if it was really there.
I did not have a set of interconnects to try the Dolby True audio (that will come later), but for now I just used the fiber optic port and sent out a down rezed audio single to my pre-amp. It should be noted that there is a bug here; receivers and pre-amps are seeing the down rezed Dolby True single as a DTS single? The audio still works but it is very faint and somewhat difficult to listen to. Warner Brothers has yet to issue a press release but it appears the problem is not with the HD-A1 player, but with the disks themselves. With any luck WB will issue a recall and I can get a new disk to try, we will see.
Conclusion
All and all I am happy with the player, I was expecting more from HD-DVD but at $500.00 MSRP the player does represent a good value, which consumers will find very tempting. The player is not without its flaws, the remote is defiantly clunky to use, and the player can take a wile to boot up a disk, the audio and video performance does fall short of that ultimate AV quality I was looking for. The video was very detailed but lacked that WOW factor I was looking for? There was lots of detail but not that micro fine detail I wanted to see. I was debating if I would keep the player or not, and I think I have decided to keep it, but with the lack of industry support there wont be much of a movie library for a wile.
I like HD-DVD but it wont stop me from getting a Blu-Ray player, I now more then ever believe Blu-Ray will offer the best in video and audio quality, but it will do so at a premium price tag, with any luck the prices will fall quickly once production starts and the release of the PS3, Microsoft is planning a HD-DVD add on drive for the Xbox 360 but is not expected to release till this fall. I personally don’t see either one of these formats failing, I think they will both take off and last for a number of years, the support of the industry is certainly with these formats, the decision of what to do is now up to you.
_________________________________________________________________
UPDATE!
It appears there is a major bug in the player.
HD-DVD disks are encoded at 1080p resolution. If you have a 720p HDTV (and most of us do) you can have the player down scale the video for you to 1280 X 720p. The problem is it appears the player is taking the 1080p video, down scaling it to 540, then scaling it up to 720. Problem is its taking the resolution away, and once its gone, its gone, you can’t put back what is missing, so your getting a 540 resolution image that's rescaled to 720. That’s bad, bad, bad!.
The best thing you can do is output 1080i to your HDTV and let the TV scale the video down to it's native resolution.
Note this is only for HD-DVD disks, Standard DVD’s scaled to 720p are find.
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