Customer Reviews:
 Come June 01, 2008 or early HD-DVD MAY NOT EXIST January 14, 2008
3 out of 18 found this review helpful
Honestly, I cannot recommend this player to anyone. Come June 01, 2008, HD-DVD will only have about 25-30% of studio support (Universal & Paramount), while Blu-Ray will have 70-75% of studio support (Warner, Disney, 20th Century Fox, United Artists, Sony/Columbia, Lionsgate, MGM). Meaning that some of your favorite movies will not be release on HD-DVD (i.e. The Dark Night, Harry Potter 6, etc.) By purchasing this HD-DVD player, you'll be running the risk that HD-DVD may not exist anymore. Leaving you with the HD-DVD player and no new HD-DVD movies, while all the new movies will be release on Blu-Ray.
I highly recommend investing on a Blu-Ray player instead.
 Fantastic HD DVD Player January 9, 2008
Upconverts DVD's to near HD quality. Slow start up but doesn't bother me due to the picture quality being phenomenal. Great HD DVD player. Transformers, The Matrix, Shrek, Bourne series, only on HD DVD!
 You get what you pay for January 4, 2008
1 out of 11 found this review helpful
-1. If you hook it up with component cables, it will only progressively scan DVDs, not upscale them. This is not a fault with the player, but a policy of the movie industry that buyers need to know about. You need an HDMI cable and a TV that supports HDCP to upscale DVDs. The packaging didn't warn about this.
-2. De-interlacing is ineffective. I frequently see interlacing artifacts in DVDs. Motion looks like a paused VCR in the middle of the show. Projection/DLP TVs seem very forgiving about bad sources, but LCDs display what they receive, and poor de-interlacing looks awful.
-3. From power-off to opening the tray takes 48 seconds. That's almost a full minute of standing there with a disc on your finger after you hit eject because you want to watch a movie but your appliance is still booting. That's longer than any new general purpose computer takes to start XP, OS X, or in most cases, even Vista. The PS3 isn't even a dedicated player, and it can load its operating system, accept a disc, sync with a controller, and let you get through the menu to the BD or DVD in about seven seconds. Specialized devices should just work.
-4. First update fails. If you receive the original 1.0 firmware, you can't update from the Internet, but the machine will try for about half an hour before leaving you with a cryptic error message. Order the free update CD and wait a couple weeks or dig all over the Internet to find an update image you can burn yourself. Once update is working, it takes the better part of an hour. I've never timed it. I usually do it when I'm about to leave the house.
-5. Updating several times hasn't helped with any of the major problems...
+1. ...but it has added one feature. The player now supports 1080p24 output, meaning no pulldown from the original film's frame timing, meaning the smoothest motion possible...
-6. ...when it works at all. The machine freezes. At least three times, it's hard locked a few seconds into the Universal splash screen, which means reaching around back to pull the plug so I can wait another minute and a half to go through the bootup process, the disc loading process, and all the piracy warnings and other spam just to try once more. Again, specialized devices should just work.
-7. It only has two options for audio out on HDMI, PCM and Downmixed PCM. My TV can forward audio from HDMI to my surround system's optical receiver. If the player would output Dolby Digital through HDMI, I could hook it up with a single cable and free up an optical port for something else. But since it will only send PCM, HDMI=stereo unless you have tomorrow's surround sound system.
+2. The player supports DTS, assuring compatibility with DVDs that have high-quality sound, but...
---- Format War ----
-8. ...DTS isn't a mandatory codec for HD DVD, so almost no HD DVD movies come with a DTS audio track. Several come with Dolby TrueHD (lossless, backwards compatible with DD), but you need to interrupt the movie with an overlay menu to switch to it. Presumably this means TrueHD isn't mandatory or not all players can downmix it for today's surround systems, but this one can. For comparison, Blu-Ray exclusives from Fox come with only a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack (lossless DTS), which is the ideal for any audio setup unless you have a rare DD but non-DTS receiver, and evidently all Blu-Ray players can handle it, either outputting its full glory over HDMI or downconverting it to regular DTS for optical. This means DD+ must be the highest-quality audio mandatory for HD DVD players, and it's just a higher maximum bitrate version of regular Dolby Digital. Like HD DVD itself, DD+ is kind of a useless half-step. The improvement is undetectable unless you have an HD audio receiver, in which case you're going to want better than DD+. Dolby Digital is the lowest common denominator in the industry. Warner Brothers, the biggest fence-sitter in the format war, releases HD DVDs with DD+ and Blu-Rays with regular DD because Plus isn't mandatory. The BDs can handle much better, but this allows the studio to be cheap and use a single source format. In other words, HD DVD's inferior sound support is indirectly dragging down the quality of Blu-Ray.
-9. Picture quality is inferior. Reference statistics for video codecs at hddvdstats.com and blu-raystats.com. I've compared the three codecs at length (VC-1/WM9, MPEG-2, AVC/H.264), and VC-1, an adaptation of Microsoft's Windows Media 9, is my least favorite and the one used for nearly all HD DVDs. It has massive color banding issues with shades of black, brown, and orange. What should be a smooth gradient looks like a paint by numbers. Color fidelity in these regions is very important for portraying skies, dark scenes, and people. VC-1 just doesn't have it, so people look unnatural and dark scenes are extremely grainy and sometimes completely drop details that should be visible. The image as a whole looks very plastic to me, like I'm looking at the movie through a thick piece of glass, and the compression algorithm picks up and amplifies all the grain and noise of the source material. Plus I tend to get a slightly green tint on the bottom edge of the letterboxed image. I saw the same from Toshiba's 3rd-gen player at Circuit City. I don't know if VC-1 is just that bad or if the player is partly to blame, but it's a distracting imperfection from "the look and sound of perfect." The best-looking movies I've seen are MPEG-2. It fits film like a glove, but not a single Hollywood movie has been released in that format on HD DVD. MPEG-2 is less compressed than the others and so requires a high-speed drive (BD is faster than HD DVD), while AVC is especially CPU intensive, so maybe HD DVD players aren't required to have the processing power to decode high-bitrate samples of it in real time. In any case, Blu-Ray easily handles all three, so the studios have much better options for making the video look as good as possible. Unfortunately, many of them just use VC-1 because that way, they only have to encode the video once to release it on both formats. Warner Bros. doesn't even release dual-layer BDs or up the video bitrate for the second release. So once again, HD DVD's inferior video capabilities and smaller storage capacity are indirectly dragging down the entire industry. If HD DVD disappeared today, Blu-Ray would become more impressive in its absence. Instead of the fierce, innovative competition we'd hope for, there's just confusion and lazy releases.
Score: 9 cons, 2 pros, 64% negative. In short, the player is a lemon, and one of the many, many reasons I'm fed up with HD DVD. If you want HD movies but can't afford to go both ways, Blu-Ray is the much better technology.
Great 1080p HD DVD Player December 31, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this Toshiba HD-A20 HD DVD player for about 3 months and played over 15 HD DVD movies already. So far it is fine and no problem at all for playing every movie. At that time, I also bought a Sony 1080p SXRD 60" TV (KDS60A3000) for watching this HD DVD movies and HD broadcasting. That Sony TV is a fantastic great product to show the details of HD DVD. HD-A20's picture and audio (Dolby TrueHD) quality are awesome. Recently I just received the firmware upgrade CD (from 1.1 upgrade to 2.7) and the player right now even better outputs the 1080/24p video signal. I'm very satisfied with this player and like the HD DVD format with the picture in picture feature.
 Only Composite Cables Included - Lame December 26, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
So far the product has performed incredible, but they only get a 4 out of 5 stars for only including composite cables for the HD DVD Player. Even if they didn't include ANY cables it would have been less of an insult. "Here is your new High Definition DVD player, but here are some cables that don't let you watch hi def content." They should have just included a metal spork as that would have been more useful. To summarize: buy some HDMI cables if you want to use this product.
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