to our american friends

[oscarmadfish]

i think HD-DVD gets released on the 18 apr ?
we look forward to an early review from our forum friends across the pond
TIA

[Avi]

i think HD-DVD gets released on the 18 apr ?
we look forward to an early review from our forum friends across the pond
TIA


This is from AVSFORUM


Hands on With Japanese Toshiba Player

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Today was an exciting day at Microsoft. We saw our 3+ year journey in HD DVD bear results in the form of the Japanese Toshiba player. And what an incredible feeling that was. OK, enough with sentimental stuff .

We only had a couple of hours with it tonight. But here are some hopefully useful tidbits.

1. The fan is very quiet. It was barely moving air in the sample unit and putting just slightly warmed air. The case was cool even after 2 hours of playback. So noise is a non-issue in this setting. The fan may run louder though if you put it in a hotter space.

2. The VC-1 US titles have amazing, just amazing picture quality. OK, so I am biased. But you will see this for yourself soon enough. Even pausing action scenes does not reveal much if any artifacts, standing a few inches from a 45” set. We watched a half a dozen movies (yes, some that are not yet released ). And while some are more breathtaking than others, you never mistook these for lite-HD or upsampled DVD.

We were watching these titles on (Japanese) Qualia 005 1080p Sony LCD display. So I expect the experience to be even better on a proper projector and something with nicer blacks.

The Japanese Cherry blossom sample DVD as reported is awful. What is not reported is that the SD version is not even watchable. Clearly the master had problems and the encoding just made it worse. The HD version is watchable but does not do justice to the format. It is a hybrid title though so you get to compare the two sides yourself as we did.

The other title, Resident Evil, was much better but still not in the same league as the US titles. It is a bit softer than what we get with VC-1 and has more artifacts if you pause it. Still, for average consumer, it will pass the “HD test.”

My favorite movie of the bunch was Last Samurai. The resolution and quality is just breathtaking. Given that this is one of my favorite movies, I am super pleased to see it perform this well. The player clearly outperformed the LCD which due to its slow response time, smeared on high motion sequences (as I reported on my review of this set last year).

3. iHD interactivity is alive and well on US titles. The studios are not pushing the limits here by any stretch. But the menus are elegant. And oh yeh, the movie just plays when hit Play. You have to call the menus for them to come up.

4. The configuration can be changed on the Japanese player to have English menus. You can also set the default language for the disc to English. At which point, the Resident Evil plays with English sound track! So we have our first “BD title” in HD DVD if go through the process of ordering it from Japan.

5. Not sure anyone cares but switching to 720p makes the picture softer. And noticeably so. It is great to have a source that is so sharp that one can see the difference so clearly. I feel bad for folks who have less than 1080 resolution sets . Of course, an external scalar may do better.

Edit 1: Seems like I caused some confusion here. This test involved the player downscaling the picture to 720p, and my 1080 display upsampling it back to 1080. With a real 720p display, the picture quality should be better. Sorry about the confusion.

Edit 2: Just tested Panasonic HD plasma. 1080i picture is quite sharp and satisfying. 720p seems less so. Since these sets are not true 720, it is possible that maintaing the resolution through the HD DVD player to the plasma is the way to go. It is the only way to assure a single conversion.

6. All of our testing was with HDMI which also carried the audio. Did not have time to play with other settings.

For those of you who have this unit on order, you are in for a treat. I know a number of MS employees ran off to order their own unit after seeing what this box can do. And even jaded folks like us who see these movies in professional setting from D-5 masters, were completely taken back by what we were seeing. It is one thing to debate such things on the Internet, it is an entirely different matter to really experience the unit!

Amir

[Lyris]

3. iHD interactivity is alive and well on US titles. The studios are not pushing the limits here by any stretch. But the menus are elegant. And oh yeh, the movie just plays when hit Play. You have to call the menus for them to come up.
Thank hell. I hope they don't do down the DVD route and have all those completely irritating bad 3D rendered menus with long transitions that you can't skip.

That said, a lot of Japanese DVDs go straight to the movie.

Not sure why he mentioned #5 though? Downscaling to 720p then having the screen scale it back up... of course it's counterproductive.

[paulfoley]

This AVSForum User has managed to buy both a player & Films from as Best Buy Store before the street date - Boy do I want one now !

Thoughts on HD-A1/ TSL PQ

Hey Everybody!!! My wife and I just finished watching The Last Samurai and let my tell you it looked so good. I was watching it on a 46" Samsung DLP which has 720p native resolution. I did my calibration of the display using the THX optimizer on the SD DVD - SW EPIII. It was connected to the TV via HDMI and I sent the audio to my receiver using the Toslink out to the receiver. Tomorrow I'm going to unhook my DVD-A player and hook up the analog outs so I can experience DD+.

PQ
I have to say that this is the best HD footage I have ever watched. Both my wife and I commented over and over again about how there was no visible pixelation (macro blocking?). When I watch shows like LOST it looks great but there is always some level of blocking during the night and/or dark shots. I saw none of that on this DVD. Also there were no jagged edges - It simply looked superb. We kept saying how clean and finely detailed everything looked. The picture was just stunning. Ultimately I felt like this is what I had been looking for - namely HD without all of the artifacts and problems that I constantly see when watching HD over cable. Unfortunately I don't have D-theater or OTA HD-DVD but it looks a lot better than the HD that I get from Time Warner.

Upconverting
I watched just a little of SW EPIII and I feel like it does a good job of upconverting but after watching an actual HD-DVD it's going to be hard to go back SD DVD's.
I'll need to watch a whole movie upconverted before I can make a lot of detailed observations.

Audio
I used the toslink out to my Kenwood reciever. This is a very consumer level receiver but I play music for a living and I feel like I've spent a lot of time making my system sound as good as it possibly can. I thought the audio sounded great (Dolby DD) but I'm looking forward to hearing DD+ through the 5.1 analog outs.

The Player
It's big Seems very solidly built. Remote is nice. Took me a while to get the hang of the remote. It seems silly but it only needs a gentle touch. Once I figured that out and turned on the sound for the remote (soft beep) it was working pretty well for me. The setup menu is simple and easy to navigate. I did notice a some fan noise while I was going through the setup menu (silent room - no audio through the system). Once I closed the glass door on the entertainment center and started the movie I could not hear any fan noise. This is not the fatest player I've dealt with - everything kind of takes a second to get going: reading the disc, starting to play etc., it's not a big deal at all but you definitely get the feeling that this is a 1st gen player and as time goes on all of these little details will be totally smoothed out.

Misc.
There is an "HD-DVD Introduction" commercial from WB at the beginning of TLS about HD-DVD: it's features, benefits, upcoming titles, etc. and honestly it was really cool. My wife is interested in this stuff but she is more of an average consumer when it comes to home theater. It made her go "now I get why you're into this". It really gives the average person on the street a great demo of why HD-DVD is so much better than SD DVD. I thought it was awesome. Also, in this commericial, there are clips of HP, Matrix, Batman Begins and ,oh my goodness, I can not wait to watch these movies on HD-DVD. They look so amazing.

Final Thoughts
I can not wait for all of you to get your players/movies. I have learned so much about home theater by being a member of AVS forum and I can't wait until we can all geek out together about our HD-DVD players!!!

p.s.
Someone asked how I got the movies today. Honestly I was all ready to pay - I was not going to even ask about the movies because I know they are not supposed to release them before the street date - and the guy helping me asked If I wanted some movies to go with my player. Obviously I said of course - if they have them - (I was assuming they would be SD DVD's) and he pulls out TLS and Phantom in HD-DVD. At that point I said sure and paid for them and got out of there before someone told this guy that they weren't allowed to do that. I know that I completely lucked out. It was pretty exiciting.

[KillerOfThreads]

That AVS thread is very interesting, and the US prices for brand new tech.

I was thinking of buying one of the upscaling DVD players, but I'm now wondering how long we will have to wait and our prices.

I hadn't considered HD-DVD with my PJ as I thought it would be way off and be too expensive, so hadn't even bothered with the whole HD thread here. Now I'll sit tight.