HD-A20 in Review

After several days now of tweaking with and playing with the A20, I figured I would give it a full review. Yes it's been out for a while, but with the price drop in some stores to $299.99 with the offer of 5 free HD-DVD's, I feel that now users may be more interested in purchasing one. With that in mind, here we go.

Just out of the box
1 HD-DVD A20 player with a firmware version of 1.0
1 Power Cord
1 Remote
2 batteries
1 Composite cable

All pretty standard, but I did have to laugh at the idea of a Hig Def DVD player shipping with a Composite cable. Doesn't that defeat the idea of, oh, 1080P? Shouldn't these things ship with HDMI Cables?

First Step
1. Upgrading of the firmware. The TV went upstairs and hooked up to my router. I had to configure the network settings on the player to use the Internet upgrade. The process took approximately one hour to upgrade the firmware to 2.2. Why do you do firmware upgrades? HD-DVD companies had the premonition to understand that while the technology grows, early adopters may not be able to use their player on later released HD-DVD's. The ability to upgrade the firmware allows the technology to grow without the hurting the early adopters. A nice touch I think.

Comparison vs. 1080i Upconverting DVD
Comparison of standard version of 300
Hooked up to a Sharp Aquos 46" 1080P LCD via HDMI

I have to admit that my Upconverting DVD did a hell of a job. 300 looked pristine. I watched the opening battle scene in it and thought that it looked pristine. Colors were crisp, lines were clean. There were no issues at all with picture via 1080i.

Then it was put on the new Toshiba HD-A20. Lines and separations of color were much cleaner. This is definitely a difference in the progressive vs. interlace technology however. If you are purchasing this solely for upconversion while you await a technology to win the race.

HD-DVD playback
DVD's used: "The Fountain" and "Smokin' Aces"
I chose these 2 DVD's for two reasons. "The Fountain" is very graphic intensive with CGI and all sorts of other-worldly displays. "Smokin Aces" is high action with plenty of explosions and violence.

First up was "The Fountain". Holy crap can I say the quality was incredible. The colors were vivid and crisp. The brightness and overall realism of the picture is out of this world. Even in some of the most vivid CGI scenes, it all looked perfect. The only issue I had with it was during the dark scenes. For whatever reason the player auto-adjusted and made hte picture a bit darker during some of the scenes.

During "Smoking Aces" the action and colors again were incredible. You ever watch a fight scene and expect some sort of roughness around the edges? That's the first thing to disappear inside of an HD-DVD. At no times do you struggle with picture quality or anything of the sort. At no times does anything look out of place. It's a perfect picture, in and out.

Final Thoughts
Is it worth it? At $299 for pure 1080P I think it is. But at its full price of $399 I'd definitely question it. The truth of the matter is that the earliest movies on it aren't fully developed for it. I truthfully think "Transformers" (the real reason that I purchased on a HD-DVD player) will be the first movie to do so. But as it is much cheaper than even a PS3, it's the best way to jump into High Definition movie watching.

In closing, I'd like to add this thought: The fight very much so isn't over. With the biggest hits of the summer coming out exclusively on the HD-DVD format, this has evened the playing field again. I thought the game was over when Blockbuster said to exclusively go with Blu-Ray. But now, it's all over.

In reading that Venturi is releasing a HD-DVD player for $199 over the holiday season, the fight is definitely stepping up. Pick your sides now and go show your support!