First Look At Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD Player @ AV Watch

[Ian]

AV Watch has taken a brief look at the Toshiba HD-XA1. It's in Japanese but they have plenty of pics:

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/ ... /hddvd.htm

[yuki chan]

IT seems that the internal DVD drive is actually an NEC loader mechanism (I bet just a pc IDE or SATA version).

Well as for what AV watch has said, “It is the first generation product of its kind and is rather slow on loading”. They did say though the player was made from very good materials and felt worth the 499 price tag (they said the us model will actually be cheaper than the Japanese model). Fan noise was another concern of the reviewer, said it could be rather annoying in a living room environment.


As for component output and D4 (Japanese component out), it does not allow full resolution. The player does up convert regular DVD selections in 720p or 1080i through the HDMI. AV watch has stated that the various blue ray solutions out preformed this player. One interesting feature is that the player can firmware update from the internet through the Ethernet port. The flash memory has about 130MB free for user updatable information.

In the final selection they said the video quality was great but one should wait for a better firmware or a newer generation.

[Ian]

lol.. they took it apart:

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/ ... hddvd2.htm

Now I know why Toshiba's HD DVD players are so expensive. They use an Intel P4 2.5GHz CPU!

[vinnie97]

silly bastards, they could cut the price and hasten adoption of the format by settling with AMD for the brain...

[Pradeep]

Probably got them nice and cheap from Intel, since they are EOL'd for current PCs.

[Ian]

You gotta wonder too if these things were manufactured months ago and have just been sitting in a warehouse, waiting for stuff like AACS to be finished up.