Well, after about a week of using the two Toshiba HD-DVD players that I bought (see previous posts) I decided to return them. I had several motivations.
First and perhaps least, the video from the Toshiba HD-DVD player was great but the video on upscaling DVD players is pretty good too. I know my kids don’t care. Kathy says she can see the difference but the value she places on it isn’t high so that means that I’m the only one that places any significant value on it. Based on the other issues (see the next issues), I’ll live without it for a while longer.
Next, the usability of these particular players is just awful. When you turn on the Toshiba HD-DVD player, it takes about 2 minutes before you see any video pop on to your TV screen or any controls will work (meaning you can eject the tray to put in a movie). When you put a movie in the tray, it takes close to another 2 minutes before you see the menu for the movie. This means that it takes 3-4 minutes to get a movie playing. That is just sad. Also, the Toshiba HD-DVD player doesn’t seem to remember where it was last on the disk when you turn it off and that is also sad (not to mention that we’ve gotten used to a multi-disc version of remembering where you were on a disc on our Sony DVD players).
Lastly, content is limited and given the news with Warner Bros the HD-DVD content will become increasingly limited so HD-DVD is probably going to be a dead end. I could have stayed with the players but this was probably the deal killer for us and so we returned them.
We did briefly consider getting Blu-ray players but I think it’s smart to hold off at this point. The Warner Bros news, CES, and time itself will likely lower the prices of Blu-ray players so that maybe next Christmas we can get 2 players.