Pros: Good build quality, handles SD DVD very well
Cons: Quirky, needs "updating" via patches
The Bottom Line: A good player that does the job but needs updates/patches to overcome quirks/take advantage of some features; HD-DVD is a step ahead but is not a miracle
scoundrel's Full Review: Toshiba HD-A1 Player HD-DVD Player
I was extremely excited to get this player. I have been reading about BD (blu-ray) and HD-DVD for a long time, and with the recent reports of Sony’s stumbles with BD and the generally high praise of HD-DVD’s launch, I took a plunge into HD media with the HD-A1.
My Equipment
Boring but important, since it will have different results in your home: I have a Toshiba 51H83 51” HD set – it maxes out at 1080i and is a few years old, only has a DVI in, and is not a DLP or LCD projection screen (see my review). I am not using any enhancement features (flesh tone, DNR, etc). My receiver is not so important here but for what it's worth: Harman Kardon AVR 435 (see my review).
First Impression
It has a nice feel to the build quality, comes well packaged, and other than being very large (and deep) it looks great on the rack in my opinion. Firing it up revealed a few quirks: first, it has a fan. Not as noisy as the old PS2 fans, but you can hear it. I didn’t notice it during playback as I watched movies, but when you stop the film it’s definitely there, spinning and cooling in an otherwise quiet room. Next: I hooked it up through the HDMI out, of course, and found that my screen was blank. Well, it defaults to analog out, and you have to hit the “v output” button on the remote to cycle through to HDMI. Next, to exit the setup menu (which launches automatically the first time you use it) you have to press “setup” – which is all fine, except the setup key is hidden under a pull-down flap on the remote.
The Infamous Boot Delay
If you’ve talked to anyone about this machine you know it takes forever to start playing. I had heard that as well, and so since I was braced for it it didn’t seem that bad. It’s actually most noticeable when you load an HD-DVD (as opposed to a DVD). Interestingly, there is no splash screen or other visual greeting – just “loading” and other simple text messages. The small icon on the upper right of the screen was even chopped off on my screen (but all movies played back just fine). There is actually a Pentium chip in ths box, and this is essentially a PC running on Linux, which you don’t see of course because it’s all in the background, but it’s interesting. It is part of the reason it can be “patched” so easily, which is mixed blessing (see below).
Setup/Controls
The setup menus are easy to navigate and fairly straightforward. Interestingly, there are no color or picture controls (which was a problem for me – see my “blood” comments below). It has 3 “skins”, which is neat but just fluff. It does not have an option to show the movie jacket, a pet peeve of mine: many DVDs (and ostensibly HD-DVDs) come with a still shot of the movie cover that can be displayed when you stop playback (instead of the player logo). Not only is Toshiba one of the companies that offers this feature on their DVD players (so why not this one?) but this player actually has no logo or splash screen at all. All this HD goodness and no fancy graphics? Oh well.
HD-DVD Playback
First off, let me tell you that I went through 6 DVD players to find the one that looked best on my screen, and so I’m comparing a VERY good DVD picture to the HD-DVD picture, using the same monitor. All of these comments are from viewing it over the component outputs (see below for more on my HDMI trouble). So when I fired up Goodfellas in HD I was underwhelmed. It looked awful during the first scene – a night scene with low light, just the kind of image I thought HD would do a better job of. Is it my screen? Possibly. One part of this is that “film” is actually not the crisp pristine thing we think of when we think “HD” – it’s a rich (and very old) medium that has its own life and quirks, very different from watching “Shrek” which of course was born digital. So back to Goodfellas: after the initial scene, everything got better. Almost every scene was rich with detail and very clean. No noticeable artifacts or pixilation. Then I watched a newer film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which again looked very good, very clean, no pixilation, rich colors. Was it better than DVD? Yes, most scenes look better. But only 20% better, not Wow better. It looked less amazing than most of the content on Discovery HD, which is the benchmark “wow” for HD. IT looked MUCH better than HD movies over DirecTV, but that’s not saying much since in my experience “HD movies” on DirecTV means a DVD being played back and compressed up the wazoo to save on bandwith (yet I hear people raving about HD movies -- is it just me? Please leave a comment if you know what's up with that).
I liked the menu system for the HD-DVDs – you can access it at any time while the film is playing, and it’s very smooth and easy. Both the movies I've watcehd forced me (well, you can skip ahead) to watch a unimpressive ad for HD-DVD and then jump straight into the movie – I’m used to getting a menu screen when I load a DVD and it was kind of like going back in time to VHS: you inserted the tape and it just kind of played the FBI warning, some previews and then the movie started. So much for loading a movie and then waiting until you were settled and ready before hitting play. Also, so far extra features and audio options are limited on most HD-DVDs, so there’s not much to setup or play with. That may change, and in theory HD-DVD has all sorts of interactive capabilities (heck, there are 2 USB ports in the front for some sort of future game pad!). Or will it? At 30 gigs, how much can they put on a disc before they have to compress it so badly that it looks bad? And will "epics" like Lord of the Rings fit on one disc without sacrificing quality? I hope so.. The forums are full of people talking about compression, codecs, blu-ray's upcoming 50 gig dual layer discs, etc (HD-DVD is using dual layer to reach 30 gigs).
Colors: Blood looked fake. What? Yes, the colors were a little off, but generally looked great (to my eye) but with some things you noticed they were off – blood looked fake, and every so often someone’s face was a little too yellow. My TV does not have individual color controls (just color/tint) and the HD-A1 doesn’t either, so I was stuck. It looked worse through HDMI, but that may have been part of my smorgasbord of issues (see below). The color issue was apparent on both HD-DVD and DVD playback, and so I assume it lies in how the player interprets color and passes it along.
1080i: the player will only output to 1080i, even if the media is 1080p (it downsamples/down-rezzes) -- this is a limit of the player and not the HD-DVD format. I *think* that most of the current HD-DVD discs are in 1080p. There are hardly any sets out there right now that take true 1080p -- many 1080p sets upsample to 1080p but only accept 1080i inputs. This is all changing, of course, but if you want 1080p from your HD-DVD you need to wait for another player.
My HDMI Issues
I started with HDMI, using an adapter to input the signal into my DVI port. This requires HDCP functionality to work, which not all older DVI inputs have, so be sure to check. The video signal in HDMI is essentially the same as DVI, with the added bonus of being able to carry audio signals and with a less 1980s-PC-look to the connector. I had no trouble, until I started watching some movies and tv shows on disc. Then I found two issues: blacks looked awful, swallowing up so many details you had to squint, turning dark hair in dark scenes to blue-black. The whites were too bright as well, making me squint when a scene had shadows and bright light together on screen. And the color issues (blood looking fake) were accentuated. Arg. I reset my TV, I tinkered with adjustments and settings, to no avail. I was unable to apply the online updates (see below) and it is quite possible that these issues were fixed – here’s the list of things that get fixed (as of now):
1.2 fixed player glitching and Blacker than Black and Whiter than White via HDMI
1.3 fixed RCA players that had the Toshiba boot up screen
1.4 fixed certain HDMI/DVI problems (Toshiba never specified)
So, 1.2 and 1.4 might solve it, since I have “blacker than black/whiter than white” issues and am using a DVI input rather than HDMI. Unfortunately I am unable to say.
Upconverting DVD
Upconversion requires you to output through the HDMI port, so unfortunately I ran into the same problems as listed above and can’t say whether or not it does a good job. It *seemed* to do a good job, but with my HDMI issues I can’t say. Watching DVD material without upconversion over the component output (480p) looked very good, comparable to my current best DVD player, and this made me very happy since my goal was to replace my DVD player with this one since it can do both. It still had the color problem, however.
I will say that I was thrilled when the previews rolled on DVDs using the HDMI output – I have always been so frustrated that trailers, previews, bonus content, and other promo material is not anamorphic, making it stretch horribly on the screen. But the player, when connected digitally over HDMI, knows this and presented the material in an unstretched 4:3 format. I was very happy. However, this does not work when you play DVD through the component out. Alas.
Audio
I drool over quality audio. DTS is the best current format for quality, but most films just use the ho-hum Dolby Digital format. So I have been very excited by the new HD surround formats: Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio. There’s also Dolby Digital Plus, but all that is is an improved DD (as far as I can tell). The HD-A1 can decode DD, DTS, and DD+ and output 6 channels (5.1) through its analog outputs. You will need 6 channel analog inputs on your receiver to do this. The latest patch for the player apparently allows it to decode TrueHD as well, which is great. Out of the box mine only decoded 2 channel TrueHD which I found to be useless in a surround environment. It will not decode DTS HD, though, but as I understand it it can pass along DTS HD as regular DTS (downsampling). If, however, you are outputting through the optical cable, it can only output in the current gen formats (DD or DTS) and will downsample DD+ and TrueHD as DTS (interesting). Over HDMI it will pass the new formats as six channel “uncompressed PCM” if your receiver can take it. It is not HDMI 1.3, so it can’t pass along True HD, DD+ and DTS HD in their native format to be decoded by your receiver (not that there are any receivers that take HDMI 1.3 yet). The limits on the optical cable are not the player's fault, but are due to bandwith issues with current gen digital connections (coax and optical). The one problem here is that since it only has a 6 channel analog output and does not have HDMI 1.3, it will never out 6.1 or 7.1 soundtracks, which are about to become much more common.
Updates and “Patches”
I listed the updates (as of August 06) above, and the TrueHD update is about to come out as well. In theory, if you have your player plugging into a high speed “always on” connection you can easily apply the updates with no hassle. Additionally, movies are going to start offering special content that you will access over the internet straight from your HD-DVD player. I, however, am without high speed internet at home presently and can’t vouch for it. I like the idea and, especially for added features ike TrueHD decoding, this makes buying a first gen player a little less painful. Will they eventually enable DTS-HD Master Audio decoding too?
The Format War
If there were no format war, and players for HD-DVD were going to be affordable, then this would be a nice easy and straightforward step. Improved but not miraculous content that will look even better on true 1080p screens of the near future. But with BD (blu-ray) fighting in this format war, and the improvement coming in at “great but not amazing”, I’m not sure I can truly recommend the HD-A1. I got it cheap ($430) but it’s still expensive. Netflix rents HD-DVDs, which is great, because how much do I want to invest in discs that will only play on this player and may be obsolete if HD-DVD loses the format war? A quick final note on formats: BD and HD-DVD are both capable of using the same video codecs (compression formats), but as of right now (August 2006) HD-DVD is the only one using the “better” quality VC1 codec, which was one of the selling points for me.
Plays high-def HD DVD discs for sharper, more detailed picture performance than standard DVD discs ; measures 17.7 x 4.3 x 13.4 inches (WxHxD) Backwar...More at Amazon Marketplace
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