Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Toshiba HD A2 for $98.87

I never felt the SD video off the Xbox360 was all that great, the XA2 blows it away, my new A2 is still in the box so I can't compare it to either, I haven't decided if I'm going to keep it or give someone a really nice X-mas gift. Even though my closest Walmart is 45 miles away it was too good a deal to pass up.
I have to say from what I saw Toshiba just got a ton of HD DVD players on the street, I called Walmart this morning at 08:00 and asked them to hold an A2 for me, they gave me an hour to get it. At 8:45 when I picked mine up the sales lady told me all the Walmarts in the area had sold out by 8:30.
There were many of those Sanyo 50 inch Tv's at $998.00 going out the door also.

That's an interesting comment on the difference between component and HDMI. When I first bought my 720p/1080i Sammy, I also purchased a Toshiba SD player with HDMI since my current DVD player didn't have HDMI. I was so unimpressed with the HDMI compared to component from my current player that I took the Toshiba back.

Are you talking about the 360 drive or the 360 HD DVD add on drive??

Hooked everything up, HDMI for video to my Sanyo Z3 at 720p, and optical to my Pioneer Elite VSX-54TX. I put in the firmware CD right away without even testing anything out, and it went just fine. Took about 10 minutes to update from the CD. I then put the CD in a sleeve, put that into an envelope, and already put it in the mailbox to head to Rick (BrotherBob)...

The only HD-DVD I have right now is Batman Begins...

I put it in and though, hmmm. This is pretty dang nice. I wasn't "blown away" right away so I did some A/B tests.
I took a very scrutinizing look at the video, and I knew that it was nice, but when I then put the SD version of the movie in my Panasonic S97 and did the upconverted view of the SD disc (so that I could compare to what I was seeing before and what I thought was a great picture already) THAT is when I started realizing how good HD really is. The upconverted picture of the SD DVD was really good, but it also "upconverts" any pixelation or grain to the image. With the HD, it didn't have any graininess to it, and no pixelation, and then you start noticing facial textures, hair details, rocks, dirt, everything is really clear on the HD-DVD version. Now I AM blown away! I didn't watch anywhere near even a fraction of the movie as I was "supposed to" be cleaning the basement for when my parents come to visit tomorrow, and it is 12:50 AM right now and I have more work to do yet, but I wanted to report in. YES, the HD-A2 is worth it!

What is the size of your Sanyo and how far away do you sit from it?

Nick, now we can really say welcome to the club, you have seen the light.

I bought the HD-A2 from WM today. FW version was 1.3 and the unit was manufactured in March, '07. I downloaded FW version 2.5 onto to the A2 and put in SD version of Master and Commander projected at 720p through a Panasonic PT-AE900U to a 102" screen. Having watched this movie a dozen times through the Oppo 981 (also set to 720p), I immediately noticed that the upconversion through the A2 was better. There was more detail, less grain, and better/brighter coloration. I doubt that my wife can tell the difference (will need to coax her into the HT room for AB testing this weekend), but I am fairly confident that if someone else did the switching of the players in an AB testing, I can tell these units apart with this movie. I can't wait to rent an HD-DVD movie and see what that's like.

I have not compared the audio between the Oppo and A2 with this DVD. Of course, the A2 does not have SACD/DVD-A, but A2 re-compresses the decoded audio from DD+ and TruHD soundtracks into 1.5 megabit per second DTS streams - the highest datarate that is supported by SPDIF. Since my integrated amp does not have HDMI, I need the SPDIF and the A2 should sound at least as nice as the Oppo with a DVD. The big question in my mind now is whether I should buy the HD-XA2, which has the Reon HQV video processor, a 12-bit 297 MHz (vs 11 bit/216 MHz in A2) video dac with 4x oversampling and HDMI 1.3 output. I read from a post elsewhere that the video with XA2 does look better than with the A2, if you have eagle eyes. Perhaps Homedad, who has the XA2 and now has the A2 can give us a comparison when he can.

John

The screen is 16:9 format 104" and I am sitting about 14 feet from it.

ihifi, you are already hitting upgrade-itis? I was wondering about the XA2 a few weeks back so that I could use the analog audio to get some HD audio, but for the money, I could start with the A2 and get a newer receiver with HDMI and ALL of the HD audio decoding, including DTS-HD Master Audio, so for now, I am sticking with the A2 and if the funds allow, I will get a different receiver first, but with Christmas coming, and buying gifts for other people, I won't be doing anything on that front for a while.

Hay, I am talking about the internal xbox dvd drive in comparison to the a2. The content I was viewing was a standard def. dvd of transformers.

The internal xbox dvd drive is supposed to have some upconverting capabilities. I always thought dvd's looked great on it, but they looked even better on my a2.

I will watch some hd dvd content on the player tonight or tomorrow.