- All
- New
- Pre-owned
5stars
53ratings4stars
30ratings3stars
5ratings2stars
2ratings1star
2ratings
Easy to use100% agree
Good image quality93% agree
Well designed93% agree
86 reviews
HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray War
With the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray war going on, buyers are torn between which format to buy. I thought is that we should support the one that gives us the most vlue for our money. That to me is HD-DVD. Why support brands that force consumers to pay 3 times more than the competitors prices? Don't give in to these companies that are trying to monopoloize the industry standard when neither formats have any performance advantages to the other. Each side can argue their points, but in the end, it's all about who will be ripping you off. Blue-ray supporters strategy is to make it seem like just because some top movie studios are supporting their format that it is the superior format. Don't be fooled by their claims. HD-DVD has just as much to offer in quality and performance as Blue-ray. In fact, Sony's Playstation III doesn't even offer DTS surround sound audio in its Blue-ray player. My advice to anyone who is still on the fence about these two formats is to buy an HD-DVD player now. Watch what you still can in the HD-DVD format. And use it as an upconverter for regular DVDs. If and when Blue-ray finally wins the format wars, don't give into them unless they dramatically drop their prices. I have a Mitsubishi 1080p 65" LCD and regular DVDs look great on my Toshiba HD-A3 Player HD-DVD Player. You can't hardly see the difference!Read full review...
Solid low priced HD DVD PLayer
The Toshiba HD-A3 is an outstanding value. It replaces the model HD-A2. I bought one for my Father for a Christmas present and he is delighted.
I own a Toshiba HD-A20. It too is an excellent player now replaced with the model HD-A30. When the A3 came up on eBay I decided to bid on it. I got it for a very reasonable $87!! Plus $22 shipping. Now I have the A20 and the A3.
I notice that the A3 loads much faster than my A20 and the overall size of the A2 is smaller and thinner than the A20.
As for performance, the A2 played everything I threw at it: HD DVD, DVD and CD. Excellent picture quality and great sound.
I won't bore you with all the technical details as you can look those up on the web. Let me just say that this HD DVD player is everything that most peope would want from a HD DVD player. Excellent quality, picture and value.Read full review...
Toshiba HD-A3 Player
On the plus side, this unit gives a good picture, and has a lot of features. On the minus side, it takes several seconds to power up, and load. Also there are not enough out put ports when using the rca type cables. In my case, I needed extra audio outputs for my surrond system. The player only has 1 set of outputs. If using the HDMI output, it will resolve the problem, but that will be the only option.Read full review...
HD DVD Player Good/Bad
Excellent unit! Very well priced and great addition to A/V system.
Disappointments with only 2 channel audio out. (no 6 channel for surround)
Very happy with formats that it plays and the quality on a 1080i HD monitor.
A little disappointed with how it shows full screen movies - picture is distorted.
Widescreen format shows up AWESOME!
Minimal negative, but cannot hook it up to switched power on receiver. Unit loses settings if not plugged into constant power.
Would buy again, but it is definitely not a single DVD player solution for system.Read full review...
Toshiba HD-A3 Player HD-DVD Player
I decided to go with Toshiba's HD-A3 mainly because of Toshiba's reputation and the price. I wanted a nice little player that would play HD DVDs that wasn't gonna cost $300 or $400 dollars. I don't see the point of spending over $120 on some player that plays HD DVDs when HD DVDs are still pretty rare and can't be rented at most Blockbusters and Hollywood videos. You go to Wal-Mart and they have like 10 different movies to choose from. Plus the new releases cost up to $34! The look of this unit is nice. It's shiny and black with a thin silver strip at the bottom and matches perfect with my Sharp Aquos 32in HD TV - which is another reason I chose it. It comes with 2 HD DVDs, but I don't see the freakin' point when you can't even watch them!!!!!! Here I was all excited to get this thing after waiting a week for it to arrive from Fed EX just to find out they don't give you any component cables or HDMI cordS to hook the freakin' unit to your HD TV! How ridiculous!!! What is up with these new electronics these days? You buy one thing and then you gotta go out and buy all these other little things just to get that on thing to work. It's like buying a car, but it doesn't come with the engine or something. Ridiculous. Now I gotta spend my day looking for cables, etc. Otherwise, it looks great and I'm sure I will be very satisfied with it after I get the cords to actually watch it.Read full review...
Toshiba HD-A3 Player
A very nice unit...does everything you need to play HD and standard DVD's. Of course, that is kind of a moot point now that Toshiba and the HD crowd have folded their tent and stolen off into the night. However, for the price I paid, it was still worth it. I am using NetFlix right now and they have dozens of titles in the HD format to enjoy. My only complaint on the unit is how slow it is to come to life. I find it quite annoying that I can not simply push the "open/close" button and have the tray come right out. You have to wait until the unit goes through its entire startup and loading sequence and decides it does not have a disk....and then you can open the tray. Only complaint however, other than that, it appears to be a fine unit.Read full review...
Disappointed
Toshiba has released their line of HDDVD players in what seems like a beta program without any warning to the public on the outside of the box. After opening the box, reading the instructions and setting up the machine, I realized why they included so many disclaimers about HDDVD being a new format that was bound to have problems.
The player is extremely slow in booting up, and stopped mid-movie on three just opened disks. I downloaded the firmware update which fixed most of the unexpected halts, but did nothing for the slow boot up.
The HDDVD format is not near as forgiving on scratches and smudges on the disk as the good ole DVD format. One small fingerprint was enough to lock up the machine to the point of having to do a "hard restart." Once the fingerprint was cleaned the disk played as expected.
Once the machine is booted and playing though, the features are a fun addition to the viewing experience. Most of them are available during playback which is cool. The resolution was top notch, but this model only goes up to 1080i.
Bottom line is that I would still buy Toshiba, even in the "beta." But I would shell out an additional $100 to go up to their 1080p machine. There is probably not a lot of difference in the viewing experience, but I still wonder how much better it would look on my home theater.Read full review...
Great HD-DVD and DVD upscaling.
I purchased the Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player shortly after the end of the HD format war, knowing that the HD-DVD format was soon to be the next BetaMax. The great part of the machine is that it plays regular DVDs and upscales them to HD quality. Unfortunately for some of the older DVDs, the upscaling is not that impressive but for all the ones that have come out in the last 5 years, the upscaling is phenomenal. The machine does take a little while to start up, but if you remember that this particular machine is really computer based running Linux (Busy Box), you quickly realize that this "end of life" platform machine has many other possibilities, it is hackable. For the non-geeks, this really does not matter, what does though is that for the price, you will not find a better deal on a HD player or a DVD upscaling player and that HD-DVDs are really inexpensive right now and that regular DVDs are super easy to find and play just about as well (minus the extra content that no one really cares that much about anyways). I am actually looking for a second machine just like this one soon for hacking reasons, the machine has a built in ethernet connection so that updates are pretty much automatic, this and several other features make the modification possibilities fairly huge.
I looked at several other HD-DVD players and finally decided on this particular one knowing that it is computer and runs on Linux and that most other HD-DVD players use different technology and are not Linux based and therefore not as likely to be modified or hackable as this one. This makes the Toshiba HD-A3 much more versatile and giving it the possibility of a longer life than most other similar machines.Read full review...
HD Entertainment and Solid Performance On-the-Cheap!
I bought this used Toshiba HD-DVD player as a source of HD entertainment "on-the-cheap." Previous to this purchase, I had never owned an HD-DVD player before. I've always been a Blu-ray Disc guy (and still am). But with the demise of the HD-DVD format, its loss became my gain. HD-DVD movies can now be obtained cheaply. In addition to HD TV broadcasts and the Blu-ray Disc format, the HD-DVD format can now be considered a cost-effective third option for HD entertainment. A strong case for this can be made based on this very fact--it's cheap HD. The Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player, along with the HD-DVD movies that I've obtained, has only served to complement my Blu-ray Disc collection (just to be clear, both Blu-ray and HD-DVD players will play regular DVDs; but neither player will play the other's HD-format discs).
This unit will not allow you to bit-stream Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio to an A/V receiver even if it is capable of decoding these surround formats. Instead, the HD-A3's internal Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD decoders do the work for these advanced surround formats (the same holds true for Dolby Digital-Plus). Then the decoded surround sound is passed out the HDMI connection as a multi-channel PCM digital stream already decoded. So you're still hearing the full audio quality of Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital-Plus, but only baseline (core) audio quality for DTS-HD Master Audio. But this is hardly a limitation, since the HD-A3 sounds great (there are higher-end HD-DVD players that will bit-stream the advanced versions of Dolby and DTS to a compatible A/V receiver). If you use an optical audio connection instead of HDMI, a Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital-Plus, or DTS-HD soundtrack will be output; but only as baseline Dolby Digital or DTS for decoding in a compatible A/V receiver.
From a video standpoint, the maximum picture output is 1080i, not 1080p (there are higher-end Toshiba HD-DVD players that will output a 1080p picture). But, again, there's no difference between this Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player and my Panasonic DMP-BD30 1080p Blu-ray Disc player since my Pioneer A/V receiver (and my Sony HD TV) will convert everything to 1080p anyway (if it already is not). Therefore, I judge the picture quality of the HD-A3 to be excellent. This unit also seems to upscale standard DVDs quite well. Considering this was never one of Toshiba's top-line models, the unit is a solid performer for the price (whether new many years ago, or used now)--the price was and still is right! I can sight nothing I dislike about the HD-A3. I hooked an HDMI cable to my Pioneer VSX-1120 A/V receiver, plugged her in, and the rest is history. She works like a charm!Read full review...
Coexisting with blu-ray...
If you like to purchase movies, HD DVD offers a great way to own Hi-Def movies at a bargain price. The quality is exactly the same as Blu-ray(it's the same video codec and bit rate) but the movies cost as little as 1/10 the price. Yes, there are no new titles being released....that's why you need a blu-ray player too.
Also this 1080i vs 1080p output is pretty much moot. All flat screens display 1080p only. So if presented with a 1080i signal, as long as the de-interlacing is done properly, all you see is 1080p. I can't tell any difference between my 1080p blu-ray and my HD-DVD 1080i players except it doesn't output 24p.(my TV tell me so)
Anyway, getting past the techie stuff, I use both players for hi-def viewing and find this Toshiba unit an excellent player with fairly quick load times. Upscaling of DVD's is very good too although you'll never confuse it with a true hi-def source.
This unit does not output a true(bad pun) Dolby TrueHD or DTS Master audio signals, it reconfigures it to PCM, even in the bitstream mode. I don't know how much difference this actually makes in the sound quality, but for purists, it's something to consider.
All in all, instead if competing, these two formats can harmoniously coexist and help you build your hi-def movie collection at a much lower cost.Read full review...