The machine freezes. At least three times, it's hard locked a few seconds into the Universal splash screen, which means reaching around back to pull the plug so I can wait another minute and a half to go through the bootup process, the disc loading process, and all the piracy warnings and other spam just to try once more. Again, specialized devices should just work.

Color fidelity in these regions is very important for portraying skies, dark scenes, and people. VC-1 just doesn't have it, so people look unnatural and dark scenes are extremely grainy and sometimes completely drop details that should be visible. The image as a whole looks very plastic to me, like I'm looking at the movie through a thick piece of glass, and the compression algorithm picks up and amplifies all the grain and noise of the source material.

That's longer than any new general purpose computer takes to start XP, OS X, or in most cases, even Vista. The PS3 isn't even a dedicated player, and it can load its operating system, accept a disc, sync with a controller, and let you get through the menu to the BD or DVD in about seven seconds. Specialized devices should just work.

-1. If you hook it up with component cables, it will only progressively scan DVDs, not upscale them. This is not a fault with the player, but a policy of the movie industry that buyers need to know about.

Projection/DLP TVs seem very forgiving about bad sources, but LCDs display what they receive, and poor de-interlacing looks awful. -3. From power-off to opening the tray takes 48 seconds.

So far the product has performed incredible, but they only get a 4 out of 5 stars for only including composite cables for the HD DVD Player. Even if they didn't include ANY cables it would have been less of an insult. "Here is your new High Definition DVD player, but here are some cables that don't let you watch hi def content." They should have just included a metal spork as that would have been more useful.

First update fails. If you receive the original 1.0 firmware, you can't update from the Internet, but the machine will try for about half an hour before leaving you with a cryptic error message. Order the free update CD and wait a couple weeks or dig all over the Internet to find an update image you can burn yourself.

Come June 01, 2008, HD-DVD will only have about 25-30% of studio support (Universal & Paramount), while Blu-Ray will have 70-75% of studio support (Warner, Disney, 20th Century Fox, United Artists, Sony/Columbia, Lionsgate, MGM). Meaning that some of your favorite movies will not be release on HD-DVD (i.e. The Dark Night, Harry Potter 6, etc.) By purchasing this HD-DVD player, you'll be running the risk that HD-DVD may not exist anymore.

The reason it is only 4 stars is due to it's slow start up time. I'm guessing it takes about 30 seconds from the time you turn it on until it will let you open the door to put in a disc.

DTS isn't a mandatory codec for HD DVD, so almost no HD DVD movies come with a DTS audio track. Several come with Dolby TrueHD (lossless, backwards compatible with DD), but you need to interrupt the movie with an overlay menu to switch to it. Presumably this means TrueHD isn't mandatory or not all players can downmix it for today's surround systems, but this one can.

For comparison, Blu-Ray exclusives from Fox come with only a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack (lossless DTS), which is the ideal for any audio setup unless you have a rare DD but non-DTS receiver, and evidently all Blu-Ray players can handle it, either outputting its full glory over HDMI or downconverting it to regular DTS for optical. This means DD+ must be the highest-quality audio mandatory for HD DVD players, and it's just a higher maximum bitrate version of regular Dolby Digital. Like HD DVD itself, DD+ is kind of a useless half-step.

I don't know if VC-1 is just that bad or if the player is partly to blame, but it's a distracting imperfection from "the look and sound of perfect." The best-looking movies I've seen are MPEG-2. It fits film like a glove, but not a single Hollywood movie has been released in that format on HD DVD. MPEG-2 is less compressed than the others and so requires a high-speed drive (BD is faster than HD DVD), while AVC is especially CPU intensive, so maybe HD DVD players aren't required to have the processing power to decode high-bitrate samples of it in real time.

Do not buy any Toshiba HD DVD players. Press releases state that they are no longer in the HD DVD business. They have quit making them.

I have had only one new disc lock up on me so I exchanged the disc and it has worked fine since.

Disney, Buena Vista, Sony, Warner Brothers, New Line, MGM, and Lionsgate all release movies exclusively on Blu-ray. Do yourself a favor and avoid HD DVD players. The reason the prices are so cheap is that Toshiba knows it is dead and is probably clearing out remaining inventory.

Unfortunately, many of them just use VC-1 because that way, they only have to encode the video once to release it on both formats. Warner Bros. doesn't even release dual-layer BDs or up the video bitrate for the second release.

If the player would output Dolby Digital through HDMI, I could hook it up with a single cable and free up an optical port for something else. But since it will only send PCM, HDMI=stereo unless you have tomorrow's surround sound system. +2.

In short, the player is a lemon, and one of the many, many reasons I'm fed up with HD DVD. If you want HD movies but can't afford to go both ways, Blu-Ray is the much better technology.

In other words, HD DVD's inferior sound support is indirectly dragging down the quality of Blu-Ray.

The packaging didn't warn about this. -2. De-interlacing is ineffective.

For comparison, Blu-Ray exclusives from Fox come with only a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack (lossless DTS), which is the ideal for any audio setup unless you have a rare DD but non-DTS receiver, and evidently all Blu-Ray players can handle it, either outputting its full glory over HDMI or downconverting it to regular DTS for optical. This means DD+ must be the highest-quality audio mandatory for HD DVD players, and it's just a higher maximum bitrate version of regular Dolby Digital. Like HD DVD itself, DD+ is kind of a useless half-step.

For comparison, Blu-Ray exclusives from Fox come with only a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack (lossless DTS), which is the ideal for any audio setup unless you have a rare DD but non-DTS receiver, and evidently all Blu-Ray players can handle it, either outputting its full glory over hdmi or downconverting it to regular DTS for optical. This means DD+ must be the highest-quality audio mandatory for HD DVD players, and it's just a higher maximum bitrate version of regular Dolby Digital. Like HD DVD itself, DD+ is kind of a useless half-step.

If the player would output Dolby Digital through hdmi, I could hook it up with a single cable and free up an optical port for something else. But since it will only send PCM, hdmi=stereo unless you have tomorrow's surround sound system. +2.

Come June 01, 2008, HD-DVD will only have about 25-30% of studio support (Universal & Paramount), while Blu-Ray will have 70-75% of studio support (Warner, Disney, 20th Century Fox, United Artists, Sony/Columbia, Lionsgate, MGM). Meaning that some of your favorite movies will not be release on HD-DVD (i.e. The Dark Night, Harry Potter 6, etc.) By purchasing this HD-DVD player, you'll be running the risk that HD-DVD may not exist anymore.

DTS isn't a mandatory codec for HD DVD, so almost no HD DVD movies come with a DTS audio track. Several come with Dolby TrueHD (lossless, backwards compatible with DD), but you need to interrupt the movie with an overlay menu to switch to it. Presumably this means TrueHD isn't mandatory or not all players can downmix it for today's surround systems, but this one can.

I don't know if VC-1 is just that bad or if the player is partly to blame, but it's a distracting imperfection from "the look and sound of perfect." The best-looking movies I've seen are MPEG-2. It fits film like a glove, but not a single Hollywood movie has been released in that format on HD DVD. MPEG-2 is less compressed than the others and so requires a high-speed drive (BD is faster than HD DVD), while AVC is especially CPU intensive, so maybe HD DVD players aren't required to have the processing power to decode high-bitrate samples of it in real time.

Disney, Buena Vista, Sony, Warner Brothers, New Line, MGM, and Lionsgate all release movies exclusively on Blu-ray. Do yourself a favor and avoid HD DVD players. The reason the prices are so cheap is that Toshiba knows it is dead and is probably clearing out remaining inventory.

In short, the player is a lemon, and one of the many, many reasons I'm fed up with HD DVD. If you want HD movies but can't afford to go both ways, Blu-Ray is the much better technology.

First update fails. If you receive the original 1.0 firmware, you can't update from the Internet, but the machine will try for about half an hour before leaving you with a cryptic error message. Order the free update CD and wait a couple weeks or dig all over the Internet to find an update image you can burn yourself.

The machine freezes. At least three times, it's hard locked a few seconds into the Universal splash screen, which means reaching around back to pull the plug so I can wait another minute and a half to go through the bootup process, the disc loading process, and all the piracy warnings and other spam just to try once more. Again, specialized devices should just work.

That's longer than any new general purpose computer takes to start XP, OS X, or in most cases, even Vista. The PS3 isn't even a dedicated player, and it can load its operating system, accept a disc, sync with a controller, and let you get through the menu to the BD or DVD in about seven seconds. Specialized devices should just work.

The reason it is only 4 stars is due to it's slow start up time. I'm guessing it takes about 30 seconds from the time you turn it on until it will let you open the door to put in a disc.

I have had only one new disc lock up on me so I exchanged the disc and it has worked fine since.

Color fidelity in these regions is very important for portraying skies, dark scenes, and people. VC-1 just doesn't have it, so people look unnatural and dark scenes are extremely grainy and sometimes completely drop details that should be visible. The image as a whole looks very plastic to me, like I'm looking at the movie through a thick piece of glass, and the compression algorithm picks up and amplifies all the grain and noise of the source material.

I don't know if VC-1 is just that bad or if the player is partly to blame, but it's a distracting imperfection from "the look and sound of perfect." The best-looking movies I've seen are MPEG-2. It fits film like a glove, but not a single Hollywood movie has been released in that format on HD DVD. MPEG-2 is less compressed than the others and so requires a high-speed drive (BD is faster than HD DVD), while AVC is especially CPU intensive, so maybe HD DVD players aren't required to have the processing power to decode high-bitrate samples of it in real time.