Toshiba HD-XA2 player

[Rich Z]

Just got a new HD-DVD player delivered this past Wednesday, and I felt doing a mini review of it would be worth while in this forum.

I got the Toshiba HD-XA2 model. Amazon.com has them at a REAL good price, so I figured, "why not?". The reason I chose this one was because all the reviews absolutely raved about it. The thing that really caught my eye was that they said the newer chips in this unit did such an awesome job of upconverting that most people couldn't detect ANY differences between the upconverted movies and the native HD-DVD ones. Night before last Connie and I watched a standard definition movie (Talladega Nights) that was upconverted, then another one last night in HD-DVD (Hot Fuzz). Quite honestly, I couldn't tell the difference as far as details and color rendition. It is HEADS AND SHOULDERS above the upconverting capability of my older Panasonic upconverting DVD player, though. And I thought that one did a pretty good job. Bear in mind that I am viewing these movies on a 50 inch Panasonic plasma that only does 1080i and is not the latest 1080p model now available. It may make a slight difference, but I kind of doubt it will be noticeable to all but the most discriminating eyes.

Now this has some notable benefits. I was reluctant to buy into high definition DVD now while HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are having this war of the formats. I felt it would be frustrating to want a new movie that was produced in the other format and I would just pass on buying it completely rather than having to settle for SD instead of HD. I think that would have really irritated me in short order. But this superb upconverting completely negates that concern. It really doesn't MATTER. Matter of fact, I will have a damn hard time convincing myself to buy even in the HD-DVD format and spending the extra money for the newer format when the upconverted SD movie will look pretty much the same way. I was also concerned that I was going to feel compelled to replace my current SD movie collection with the HD-DVD versions, which would have been a REAL pain in the butt, not to mention rather expensive. Thankfully, I don't see ANY need at all to do that. They look just FINE, as is. And probably saved me from a SEVERE thrashing from Connie as well. She is still irritated about my conversion from VHS tape to SD DVD........

Quite frankly, I think if a standard DVD player has the same circuitry for upconverting as this HD-DVD Toshiba unit has, it could possibly negate the entire HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war. With upconverting THIS good, it certainly removes a lot of the initiative to really choose one over the other, much less CARE about the format. While the two camps go on fighting the war, they may find that the REASON for the war, and the market they are trying to WIN, just doesn't exist any longer....

[Rich Z]

Well, I did discover a deficiency (if you can call it that) in this player tonight. It won't play crappy DVDs. A while back, I found the complete set of the X-Files on Ebay at a real decent price, and after passing a bunch of emails back and forth with the guy selling them (all lies from him, unfortunately), I got the set. The first couple of seasons were just fine, but around the fourth season, anomalies started cropping up. Wrong titles on episodes, visual artifacts, random pauses in the display, etc..... Best I can tell, yes, these ARE bootleg copies, probably from China. My Panasonic DVD player has been able to get through nearly all of them, only choking up on one single episode, and we are nearly through all nine seasons.

Well the Toshiba at first choked up right at the intro of the DVD I put in. I mean choked up GOOD. Had to pull the power plug out to reset it. When I plugged it back in, it seemed to run OK, so we sat down to watch the episode. Got about three quarters of the way through, stumbled a couple of times, then the screen locked up solid. I was able to restart the episode, and fast forward, but it choked again at the very same spot, finally displayed a message on the screen that the disk is unreadable. So I hooked the Panasonic back up, and although there were some stumbles, it did play the entire episode through. Plenty of visual artifacts, but it did keep on chugging through them, regardless.

So apparently the quality of the DVDs is more critical on the Toshiba drive then with the older Panasonic. Which means that if I want to watch those X-File DVDs again, then I have to keep the Panasonic player along with the Toshiba. If I don't want to do that, or it is just too much damn trouble just to watch those disks, then I may have to resign myself to just tossing the entire X-File set.

I think I may need to do some testing with some older DVDs, just in case. If the Toshiba has problems reading them, I better find out pretty soon.... I THINK it may just be those bootleg X-File DVDs, but at this point, there really isn't enough evidence for me to have total confidence in that assessment.

[Rich Z]

Well, I got curious about the actual VISUAL differences between HD-DVD and the upconverted versions of the SD-DVD disks from the Toshiba HD-XA2 player I recently got. The movie Hot Fuzz comes in both versions, fortunately. HD-DVD on one side, and SD-DVD on the flip side, so this made it easy to do a comparison using the same movie.

We all know that moving images on the screen can often look much better than the same image that is paused, so I picked the same spot in two different scenes on both formats and paused the movie there while I snapped a photograph.

Here's what I got as a result.

FIRST screen

SD-DVD version:


HD-DVD version:



SECOND screen

SD-DVD version:


HD-DVD version:



These images are displayed on a Panasonic model TH-50PX50U screen at 1080i. Camera was about 6 foot from the screen using a 105mm lens.

Honestly, from the excellent results I saw from the upconverting, I was rather surprised at the dramatic difference between the images. The upconverting is VERY good, but obviously not nearly as good as the native HD-DVD imagery.