It kind of snuck up on me, but HD DVD is now available in stores. I think there is only one player available (the Toshiba HD-A1, seen here), which is about $500. Here are the movies available at launch: Serenity The Last Samurai Million Dollar Baby Phantom of the Opera Seems like you can get these movies for around $20-$30 depending on where you look (deepdiscountDVD.com has a few of them for $21; they also have the player for around $480). Are there any early adopters on the board? Some pretty nice prices, all things considered. The list of movies is nice too. Isn't there a pretty large Serenity/Firefly fanbase on the board? Sorry about the lack of prepartion on this. As I said, the launch kind of snuck up on me. I might edit this post later on with more info and pictures if anyone is interested.
u don't need preparation for this stuff. Imma wait for blu ray and then costs to come down before I steal one and start d/ling movies too play on my stolen blu ray player or HD.
This may be the most uneventful new product launch ever. Yea...buy yourself a HD DVD player which doesn't have anywhere near full studio support so you can only watch certain movies. Great. I will only buy a player that supports all formats. Until that time...screw it! They created another format war and want the customer to pay the price.
In fairness, the Toshiba HD-DVD player also upconverts standard def DVDs. So there is another advantage to owning it now while we wait for more titles to be released. That being said, the player has numerous bugs, only supports 1080i(at the moment at least), and as mentioned earlier there are only 4 titles available at launch with only Serenity even remotely interesting me. I'll wait til at least the fall before upgrading.
there are 2 models, both toshiba... one is 500 and the other is 800. im gonna wait, but i'm curious to see how much better they look, or how much better my current collection will look when its upconverted.
Going back in the opposite direction is it hard to find lower speed blank DVD's? I recently found a DVD recorder for only $63. It is JVC which I have had good experiences with. Anyway I tried to record something with a 16x DVD and it wouldn't read the disk. Then I took an old one that was only 2x and it worked just fine. So I will have to buy a bunch of the slower speed ones I guess. Are they hard to come by these days? Sorry if this derails too much. RC COLA just ignore this or say something and I will delete the post if it is too much of a problem.
Aren't there a lot of DVD players doing upconversion on the market now? I doubt that is a serious selling point for a hi-def DVD player. I would expect that technology with a hi-def DVD player. Granted, you can pass the signal over HDMI with a HD DVD player versus component on a standard player but...big whoop. Blu Ray would make more sense as a purchase than HD DVD...as has been noted due to more studio support. Even then...I would still opt for the player that supports both formats. However, as has been heavily publicized, gamers will be happy with their PS3 supporting only Blu Ray. As far as the sarcastic comments on BETA, a lot of people got screwed over back then. Lessons should have been learned from that and the DivX BS a few years back. However, they have not been and here we are again.
Is the $800 model available now though? I only saw the $500 model available in the few places I looked online, so I didn't think the $800 model was available. It might be out soon though. Not that I like HD DVD, but I would think there would be some interest in it considering the price. As mentioned, it does upconvert DVD, and the movies are at a great price (IMO). Even if HD DVD were to "lose the war" rather quickly, there were still be a considerable amount of movies available on HD DVD before the end of the year (The Matrix, Batman Begins, Cinderella Man, King Kong, and Doom...OK, that last one was a joke). If you're one of those people that really wants to see some HD content on your new HD screen ASAP, this isn't THAT bad of an option to look at assuming you have some extra money. Of course, even if the player cost $100 and the movies were $10, I imagine the format war would still scare people away (and rightfully so). That's not a problem. I often derail my own threads anyway.
Buying one right now is pointless for me... upconverting is nothing more than fooling the eyes. You want a good solution, get something like BluRay with a 1080p HDTV. Now that would be nice... Come to me my sweet PS3...
PS3 can output up to 1080p. The P stands for progressive and the I stands for interlaced. You can check out some of the Wiki articles below for info on this stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_scan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080i http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080p Interlaced basically means only half of the pixels are shown at a time IIRC (half screen 1 frame, the other half the next), while progressive shows it all. Depending on the source, something like 720p might look as good or better than 1080i despite having fewer lines of resolution due to it being progressive. 1080p would have the same number of lines as 1080i, but would show like twice the number of pixels at a time, which would make it look better.
http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/dvd/hddvd.asp if i remember right, isn't hd-dvd 1080p as well, its just that the storage capacity is smaller than that of blu-ray??? which makes me wonder why, if they're the same, anyone would fall for hd-dvd when the same thing can be had with more storage capacity.
I'm enjoying watching the format war. It's a pity there's no agreement on one. In the meantime, I'm in the market for an HDTV, around 42". I'd like to keep the price around $2500, more or less. I'm looking at plasma's, because they seem to be cheaper for about the same size. I've looked at the Hitachi 42HDT52, and some others. Would like dual HDMI inputs and a PC input. Any suggestions, folks?
I know that it is on the website, but I don't see any stores that have it in stock. It seems like all the stores are only letting you preorder/reserve the $800 model, while some of the same stores have the $500 model in stock. It seems like the other model will be available soon (some stores had an ETA for today), but I think the $500 model is the only one available right now. I think both are available in Japan though. Yeah, HD DVD does 1080p also, although these first players don't support it yet. I think most of the players (for both BR and HD DVD) that will support 1080p will be using a special chip from Broadcom, but it won't be available until the summer IIRC. The higher capacity on Blu-ray should allow for higher bit rates for video and audio (meaning better quality, all else equal). I think HD DVD will have about 20-25 Mbps for video (with 36 Mbps total), while Blu-ray will have like 40Mbps (with 54Mbps total).
