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Toshiba HD-DVD Review (part 3)
A review of the latest High Definition DVD players and what to look out
for
By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your
feedback
is important to us!)
Created: November 3, 2006
Article Continued from ...
[1] -
[2] - [3]
I got everything working about 45 minutes after opening the box versus
about 5-15 minutes for connecting a standard DVD player thanks to the
strange preparations required. When you power up the box, its defaults are
pretty useless as you have to select HDMI as well as 1080i (HD-DVD doesn't
yet support
1080p), select DHCP (which is standard everywhere else on the Internet).
Without exception, ALL first generation high definition players are
based on DVD disc drives meant to be installed in personal computers. These
disc drives
are not home theater grade DVD disc drives but rather PC grade disc drives and
thus all these first generation players are often large, clunking workings. Some of the units power up like
your PC with a whirl of fans and electronics. HD-DVD also suffers
slightly from its need to spin its discs at a much higher speed than normal
DVDs creating the potential for vibrations or rattle from equipment stacked
on these drives. Toshiba units are truly
the size of a small tower PC on its side and are extremely heavy
compared to the ultra slim progressive scan DVD players we are used to.
Plugging the unit in displays a light around the power button. Pressing
the power on button begins a MINIMAL delay of 55 seconds before one can even
load a DVD. During this "boot up" an ominous "Welcome" is displayed and then
after about 45 seconds from pushing the power button other lights turn on
like HDMI and 1080i at which point the unit is perhaps within 10 or so
seconds from being usable. It is like the unit is truly booting!
Interestingly, after this "warm up" you can finally load an HD-DVD into the
player, however until it warms up the open/close button is unresponsive.
Even after leaving the unit on for a while this delay remains - it is a
feature!
Although the picture and sound of these players is spectacular. I need to
qualify that statement with the phrase, "when they work correctly!" If you
rent HD-DVDs like everyone obviously will, these players need to contend
with discs in other than mint factory condition. While two of the three
Netflix DVDs worked without error,
Lethal Weapon
proved to be problematic midway through our movie. When this happened, the
video and audio froze while the player kept on ticking like nothing had
happened. We were able to recover by moving forward a scene and then backing
up nearly to the same spot without too much trouble. However, later the
player reached a point where the video and audio froze again but this time
the player completely locked up and would not respond to any controls (even
the power off button on the unit wouldn't work). We had pull the power cord,
plug it back in, and start over. This allowed us to watch more of the movie
but only until the frozen video and audio happened again which required us
to power cycle (reboot) the DVD player again. At that point, we just put
aside that DVD as unwatchable - needless to say this was VERY disappointing!
Looking at the "troubled" DVD in the daylight there is a few light scratches
on the disk but they don't seem to be deep enough to cause much trouble.
Certainly a regular DVD with these scratches would play normally as there
are
enough smarts in traditional DVD players to work around small problems with the
media. New HD-DVD players are not yet smart enough to handle this which
could be trickier due to the increased speed that the DVDs spin.
After my use of the Toshiba HD-DVD player, I concluded that the use of PC components in these early generation
high definition DVD
players was the curse of death as, similar to PC's freezing, the only way to recover
from a wigged out HD-DVD player is to power cycle it. I just read that both Sony and Pioneer have
postponed their
Blu-Ray players until December 2006. Clearly, getting these
high definition players to work is problematic. But at least quality
companies like Sony and Pioneer want to get it right before they release
their products. Lets hope we don't see similar problems to those of these
as we have seen with early Toshiba units. I've also heard that Toshiba's just released a second
generation player called HD-A2. The new player is NOT supposedly based on a
PC disc drive and is overall slimmer than either the A1 or the XA1. However,
even if they have a new player, there seems to be something fundamentally
wrong with HD-DVD that needs solving in terms of reading ahead and fixing
problems with the media before it is visible to the consumer.
HD-DVD
use of MPEG-4 encoding also puts it at a disadvantage in that it must compress more
information on the DVD disc while attempting to fix errors in the data stream.
This requires that HD-DVD players must contend with two innovations: higher
speed rotation and a new encoding scheme. Blu-Ray on the other hand only has
to contend with only one innovation: a new laser, as the rotation speed and
the encoding schemes are the same as traditional DVD. While I have not yet
looked at one of these players, this approach seems the most logical (only
change one thing at a time). If this thinking proves out, I believe Blu-Ray will likely do a better
job of dealing with errors because it can leverage much of what has been
learned decoding MPEG-2 on normal DVDs. HD-DVD must start from scratch - and
clearly from the looks of it they are not even close to dealing successfully
with scratched media. That will take another generation of players to begin
to figure that out. So, even though Toshiba is already releasing their
second generation player, I'll bet all they did is swap the PC disc drive
for a first generation home theater grade DVD disc drive which probably
chips away a little on their ~1 minute start up time. However, coming so
close on the heels of its last round of players it is unlikely they made any
serious progress on resolving the scratched media problem, or fixed all the
locked up problems with their first generation.
Cropped images on HD-DVD was disappointing on the movies
Last Samurai
and
Lake House
which are the result of the movie being filmed with Cinescope rather than
something that HD-DVD or Blu-Ray have done - thus these films don't consume
the entire real estate of a 16x9 television monitor. In an effort to display
the movie as close as possible to how it was shown in the theater, Studios
have cropped their video - which results in a format where the image
displayed is longer than it is wide. Owners of 16x9 television monitors
despise these alterations of their movies - especially when done on
expensive media like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.
In my research I also uncovered a little tidbit that Sony is so behind
its Blu-Ray format that it has decided NOT to release any of its movies on
HD-DVD - this is a sizable archive of most watched movies. While there are
one or two studios that have signed on with HD-DVD and have not yet signed
with Blu-Ray, it is inconceivable that all other things being equal and this
technology delivers reliability along with its already proven
excellent picture quality will give one more plus to Blu-Ray.
The following represent a summary of all the glitches I've found with the
Toshiba player during my brief ownership:
- Slow Startup, even after unit has been plugged in for several hours
the unit takes a minimum of 55 seconds to answer any command from either
a remote control or the unit's front panel.
- Once disc is loaded there is another wait of about 10-20 seconds for
the video to start playing
- Once disc is loaded and playing, all HD-DVDs force you to watch an
ad about the HD-DVD format and you can't skip the ad by pressing the top
level menu or fast forward. This should be a MANDATORY feature!
- The user shouldn't have to select the output, all outputs should
just be live.
- Very poor ability to handle less than error free discs make this
unit unusable as virtually all discs become used at one point or another
- Defaults like DHCP, DNS, and NTP should be standard (activated)
rather than manual
- An Ethernet jack is a great feature, but a wireless connection would
be better and its nearly the same cost - how many people have a PC next
to their television? Great idea but lacks follow through.
- Remote that lights up at the sensing of movement is nice, however
because the unit freezes up, doesn't always immediately respond to
remote input, and also has a very narrow usable angle gives me something
in my hand during the time when I'm most frustrated with the unit - just
a bad combination! However if the remote unit does NOT light up you
can't just look at it and press the right button because it has to be
lit up so you know the buttons do.
In Conclusion:
Today I'm officially returning my HD-XA1 to Vanns for a full refund.
While it was nice to try it out, the technology is just too prone to failure
unless you have your own pristine video collection - or like the artist
opening can make your own. In my opinion these Toshiba players are ahead of
their time in terms of technology but far below the mark in terms of actual
usability. It is realistic that most all first generation players will only
work with brand new or nearly new discs (with a slight edge given to Blu-Ray).
Beyond these discs, they are nothing more than large door stops causing
their owners many hours of frustration!
Next up, I'm going to try Blu-Ray and see how that goes! Come back and
get the scoop... I'll post the the article as soon as I've learned enough to
say something intelligent about this new player.
Article Continued from ...
[1] -
[2] - [3]
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