September 2006 Reviewed by Jeff Van Dyne	Toshiba HD A1 HD DVD Player

Description Model: HD-A1 Price: $499 USD Dimensions: 17"W x 4"H x 15.5"D Weight: 15 pounds Warranty: One year parts, 90 days labor Features Disc playback: HD DVD, HD DVD-R, DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA, MP3 HD content output via HDMI	Features 11-bit/216MHz video DAC Video upconversion for SD DVD to 720p or 1080i Built-in Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS, DTS-HD decoders Dolby TrueHD compatible (two-channel only) Multichannel 24-bit/192kHz audio DACs HDMI support for 5.1 LPCM HDMI, component, S-video, composite, coaxial, and optical digital outputs USB and Ethernet ports

The fact that I’m writing today about the Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD player ($499) speaks volumes about how far downhill things have gone in the last few months for the Sony-backed Blu-ray format. At the beginning of the year I would have told you that I would either buy a Blu-ray player, or wait for the format war to be settled before I bought any new high-definition player. Since then, two things have happened to change my mind. First, Toshiba came out with an HD DVD player at near-mass-market price that’s only half the cost of any projected first-generation Blu-ray machine. Second, the early Blu-ray discs have reportedly been of poorer quality compared to the early HD DVD titles.

Format wars

This is not to say that the Blu-ray format isn’t capable of producing a picture every bit as good as that of HD DVD, but Blu-ray has gotten off to a rocky start. If you’ve paid any attention at all, you may have assumed, as I did, that Blu-ray was the odds-on favorite to win this war. After all, Sony promised us nearly twice the data capacity of HD DVD, which would surely lead to better picture quality. What nobody talked much about was that, to save on royalty costs, Sony decided to stick with the old MPEG2 video-compression codec. The HD DVD camp, on the other hand, chose the vastly superior and more efficient VC1 codec. What this means is that Blu-ray’s advantage of greater storage capacity is canceled out by the storage needs of MPEG2. The second issue is that, to date, Sony has been unable to mass-produce dual-layer Blu-ray discs, which means they actually have less storage capacity than current HD DVDs. This has led to early Blu-ray releases that look less than stellar when compared side-by-side with HD DVD. I don’t know about you, but when I spend twice as much for a piece of equipment, I expect better performance, not worse.

None of this means that the format war is anywhere near being over, but the Blu-ray camp needs to make changes to turn the tide in its favor. First and foremost, they must address the issues of picture quality, either by getting dual-layer production online or by switching to a better video-compression codec. Second, they must lower the prices of their players. Toshiba pulled a fast one by coming out of the gate with a player priced very near that magic $300 threshold, below which electronic components begin to move from early-adopter status into the mass market. There’s already some discounting going on, and if prices drop below $400 before Christmas, the Toshiba HD DVD player may be one of the hot gifts for owners of HD displays this year. The Blu-ray group seems to be pinning its hopes on a less expensive player as part of the PlayStation 3 game console, which may not be a winning strategy in the long run.

Only time will tell how this all shakes out, but few could argue that the Blu-ray rollout hasn’t been spectacularly botched. This has allowed HD DVD to take a much larger early lead than any of us thought possible. Though hardly scientific, as of the close of this review, Amazon.com’s sales ranking for the Toshiba player stands at no.799, Samsung’s Blu-ray player at no.15,951. Will this go down in history as yet another failed Sony-backed format? I’m not ready to make that call yet, but if I were on Sony’s board of directors, I’d be asking some pointed questions.

The player

Compared to the lightweight Oppo OPDV971H scaling DVD player I’ve been using as a reference in my home theater, Toshiba’s HD-A1 HD DVD machine is a beast at 4" high and about 15 pounds. My realization that this was like no DVD player I’d ever used had a lot to do with the fact that the HD-A1’s pedigree owes at least as much to the personal-computer as to the consumer-electronics industry. Under the hood is an Intel Pentium 4 processor running at 2.5GHz, a gigabyte of DDR RAM, and what appears to be a standard PC-compatible HD DVD drive. The whole thing is run by a Linux operating system on a chip. And, as in any machine running a Pentium processor, a fan vents to the rear.

The rest of the HD-A1 is more like an oversized DVD player. The front panel has the usual controls, the rear panel all the standard jacks, plus an HDMI output and an Ethernet port. The primary purpose of the Ethernet port is to support downloading of firmware updates via the Web, though Toshiba states that some movies will also allow you to link to Web pages for additional content. Of course, this requires extending your home network into the theater, which may not be a simple process for everyone. If your player isn’t part of a network, you can still get updates from Toshiba on CD; a network connection isn’t required.

The downside of all this hardware and software is that the Toshiba boots up like a PC. A lot of complaints have appeared on the Web about exactly how long the HD-A1 takes to boot. I found that it took close to a minute to go from power off to ready. My wife can attest that I’m not exactly the most patient person in the world, but I haven’t figured out what all the fuss is about. By the time I’ve gotten everything else powered up and ready to go, a minute just isn’t that long. Maybe I’ve gotten used to waiting for my projector to heat up.

What is a big deal is the remote control. Would someone please send Toshiba a handful of specialists in ergonomic design? "Bad" doesn’t begin to describe this remote, with its lack of backlighting and its rows of tiny, indistinctly marked keys. It’s sturdy and looks kind of cool, but there’s no excuse these days for something this poorly designed. It took only one movie to realize that I needed to spend five or ten minutes to update my Harmony 880 learning remote with the information for the Toshiba. If you don’t already have a good universal remote, the HD-A1 may be enough to drive you over the edge.

Setup was fairly straightforward, though I had to unplug the 10m HDMI cable from my projector and plug it back in to get the HD-A1 to handshake with the projector. I haven’t had a problem with this since the initial setup, so it should be a onetime thing, if indeed it happens at all. Getting the player to switch between outputs and then setting the resolution was less than intuitive and required a trip to the user manual the first time around. This brings up a small gripe: Changing the HD-A1’s output resolution requires cycling through all the settings instead of directly selecting that resolution with a single button press. You won’t be able to change resolutions with a macro.

The sound

HD DVD’s audio capabilities would take more space to fully explain than I have room for in this article. Briefly, the HD-A1 supports five audio formats, more or less: Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, and DTS-HD. So far, everything I’ve watched has been encoded with Dolby Digital Plus, which is compressed at a much higher bit rate than standard Dolby Digital. The original firmware supported only two-channel Dolby TrueHD lossless encoding, but as of the 2.0 firmware release, full 5.1-channel support is included. The HD-A1 supports "core only" DTS-HD; that is, it decodes the standard-resolution DTS track embedded within DTS-HD. Getting the most out of the HD-A1’s Dolby TrueHD audio capabilities requires passing a full-bandwidth signal via the 5.1-channel or HDMI outputs to your receiver or preamp, since audio passed via the player’s digital outputs is down-converted and passed as a 1.5Mbps DTS bitstream.

The picture

Of course, the picture is what HD is all about, and the Toshiba HD-A1 didn’t disappoint. Some movies looked better than others, but the better ones were nothing short of astonishing. U-571 has always been one of my prime test DVDs for audio, but the HD DVD version now puts it in my list of video references as well. The extra resolution and color depth of HD DVD allows every last detail to be squeezed out of the picture, adding an amazing amount of the depth and realism that’s so critical to dimly lit scenes. Background details that were somewhat murky in the standard DVD are clearly defined in this version. This extra detail is also apparent in subtle elements like the raindrops splashing into the ocean as the boarding party approaches the U-571. What was, before, a simple texture on the surface of the sea is now thousands of individual droplets splashing into the water. That may seem a minor detail, but the impact on the picture is major.

The HD-A1 also ups the ante in color saturation. I’d remembered the bright-colored, late-1960s clothing in Apollo 13, but was completely unprepared for the riot of color in the party scene at the beginning of the HD DVD edition. My Panasonic AE900 projector does a tremendous job of color saturation, but I’d never seen it produce colors like this. "Incredible" is the only way to describe it. The combined improvements in picture quality made the shot of the Saturn V rocket sitting on the pad before launch more three-dimensional than any picture I’ve seen on this projector to date.

Video isn’t the only thing that’s better with HD DVD. The audio clarity is greatly improved, and spatial cues are more precise. A comment in my notes compares the difference to that between MP3 and CD sound.

The HD-A1’s scaling of standard DVD was surprisingly good. Toshiba’s upconverting DVD players have not been known for their scaling abilities, so I was more than a little surprised to find that their first HD DVD player is on a par with my reference Oppo OPDV971H ($199) in this area. The Toshiba seemed to output a slightly sharper picture than the Oppo on most images. Presented with a high-bit-rate, standard-definition DVD such as the Superbit version of The Fifth Element, the Toshiba was able to produce a nearly hi-def picture. The textures of the stone faces of the glyphs in the opening scene were incredibly well defined. On the downside, I felt it suffered from a little more blurring during scenes with a lot of motion, such as the chase scene in chapter 9, but the difference was minute enough to be undetectable except in direct comparison.

The finale

As we were preparing this review for publication, Toshiba released updated firmware that resolved the poor scaling of HD content for 720p displays and added full 5.1-channel Dolby TrueHD support. Through firmware updates, Toshiba has addressed nearly all of the early criticisms of the HD-A1 and turned what was originally a capable but flawed player into a high-performance HD and SD DVD player. It's enough to make you wonder what might be coming in future updates. As of this writing, this is easily the best high-definition picture available on the market today, and it’s available for half the price of the competing Blu-ray format.

Where things will ultimately fall out in the format wars is anybody’s guess, but the Toshiba HD-A1 makes a compelling argument for the success of the HD DVD format. If you’d told me at the beginning of 2006 that I would be writing an article that looked more favorably on HD DVD than on Blu-ray, I’d have thought you were crazy. The bottom line is that, for $500, the Toshiba HD-A1 is a fine high-definition HD DVD player that’s also a first-rate scaling SD DVD player. That’s a claim the Blu-ray camp is a long way from being able to make.

Manufacturer contact information:

Toshiba America, Inc.
1251 Avenue of the Americas, Suite 4110
New York, NY 10020
Phone: (800) 631-3811

E-mail: customer_support@tacp.com
Website: www.toshiba.com

• Go Back