Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Toshiba HD-A2 player - it's getting cheap

Just saw this deal posted at AVS……. I didn’t believe it until I clicked on the link.

Toshiba HD-A2 for $199 at Crutchfeild. I didn’t realize they had “deals”.

http://www.crutchfield.com/S-9ZzsgbfPJVc...amp;pfxid=k1971

Good deal, but I'm confused. It says instant rebate up at the top, then mail-in rebate down below.

Unbelievable, Sony drops ther Blu-ray player to $499 and still get out marketed. At these prices I would guess the HDDVD market will get a huge boost.

And this one is not 1080P it appears. It has a link to another one for $200 more that does 1080P.

Yeah Jason, the A2 is no.3 in the lineup.The A20 has a 1080p output, but this may not be of any particular advantage. A progressive scan 1080 set has to deinterlace 1080i to 1080p and if it does a good job of it there shouldn't be a noticeable difference in comparison with receiving a 1080p input(if the set accepts 1080p). The top unit is the XA2, which adds the highly-regarded Reon video processor.

How was the European trip?

Yeah. I'd like a new HD DVD player at some point, but I'll put it off for at least another generation. It's kind of disappointing how many discs with issues I keep running into. I updated the firmware of my HD-A1 to the latest, but Children of Men would still hang up at one point, so I had to send it in for a replacement. Other discs seem to be doing all right except for The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which is acting like the Children of Men disc pre-update (hanging up every couple of minutes, or even more frequently, and I have to fast-forward then play again to get it going again). I shouldn't have to look forward to a firmware update every time I buy a new movie. I'm hoping that after the next generation they're pretty much golden. What are the odds, though? It seems like every piece of electronics I purchase anymore has some quirky nonsense going on. Standards are supposed to be improving, right?

I’ve had troubles with two disks. It wasn’t the machine, it was the disk. I buy from Amazon, and they exchanged them no problem……

The A20 and X2 do have 1080P, but it is a bastardized version. They pull 1080i/24 off the disk, and then apply a 3/2 drop down cadence to get 1080i/60, then they de-interlace it to 1080P/60.

Some of the Blue Ray players output a true 1080P/24 format that is stored on the disk, but nothing from Toshiba does this, and I wouldn’t count on any time soon either.

Just get the A2 unless you want SD up conversion or need analogue outputs.

Europe was good. I like Germany the best of the countries I went to. As mentioned in the beer thread, I had to pickup a case of Dunkelweissen when I got home. Germany was very clean and felt safe walking around as well. Switzerland and Italy were fun too. Italy was actual vacation, instead of a visit for work. My wife came over for that part as well. We enjoyed the sites and had lots of good food and vino.

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I'd like a new HD DVD player at some point, but I'll put it off for at least another generation

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I'm in the same boat. I'm waiting out the format wars and some improvement in the resolutions presented for displays and source equipment. I think the format wars are finally coming together with universal players already coming out and what also seems to be a market leading HD-DVD so far.
The players are getting better for visuals, better upscaling of video and decreasing prices though i'm still not sure about this DRM stranglehold with HDCP and encoding everything out the ying yang. As the newer players come out, i hope they remain backward compatible with component video or dvi connections. I would be aggravated to have to get a new display and receiver just to require the HDCP connection.