Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD Player Reviewed
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?Compared to Sony’s $1k Blu-ray players, the Toshi HD-DVD is a frickin’ bargain at $500 smackers. But is it work the discount? Here’s the latest review from Digital Webcast…
The Toshiba HD-A1 ($500) is the first high definition disk player on the market. At the same time, HD DVD movies in this new format are slowly becoming available — at this writing, there are approximately 20 titles on sale for the nascent HD DVD format. We took a close look at this first HD DVD player, putting it through its paces with both HD DVDs and standard-definition DVDs, and found it to be a frustrating experience that we hope amounts to the consumer electronics equivalent of opening-night jitters.
Taking the HD-A1 out of its box, its appearance reminded me of the first days of consumer VCRs, where early VHS machines looked almost identical to this HD DVD player. Not only is it boxy and ugly, but it’s big — it really is about the size of early VHS recorders. Its squared-off design shows little imagination; I was hoping for a more impressive appearance from the first iteration of this brand new format.
As I started up the player, I was immediately disappointed to hear fan noise emanating from the back of the unit. It wasn’t just subtle whirring of the cooling unit, either — it was almost as loud as some of the quieter projectors we’ve tested here at the Midwest Test Facility. Not good. Fan noise of any kind is not welcome, especially in a home theater environment. We were off to a rocky start.
Source: Digitalwebcast