- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 13 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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2 out of 3 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"Glitches as expected for new format"
Pros: Stellar Video performance
Cons: Sound glitches, startup delay, easily gets lost
Summary: Ok, if your as crazy about HD as I am you will be looking into one of the HD players for your home. Be warned these are new format player and they will have problems. But if your willing to work through the difficulties it will be worth it.
The first thing I would suggest you do is turn on the audible beep that acknowledges the player got your remote command.
Second, wait for it to respond. Its responds like a busy PC without the progress bar to tell you its busy and will be confused if you give too many commands.
Problems; I noticed an audio drop out problem with all three of the HD DVDs I tried. The sound would drop out for a fraction of a second 2 to 9 per hour during the movie. It sound just like audio drop out you get when playing a DVD on a laptop with too many task running in the background.
Another problem is the player did not play any of my CDs. I tied Telarc CD, RCA CD and a three others. None of them would play on the HD XA1. I was told by Toshiba this was a hardware problem and the new unit should be sent in for repair. I think the problem may be in the audio setup and I just have not had the time to check it out. So far the Toshiba customer service has not been must help.
Movies vary greatly in how they look and perform in the player. Phantom of the opera makes a good HD demo for now. Serenity has a very clean picture, but the special features would not work and generated a motor boot type sound that seemed about to blow my speakers out.
Generally I feel HD DVD is a good 1st product for HD DVD early adopters. The firmware update feature should allow most of the glitches to be fixed without sending the unit in to the repair shop. For the average user that wants HD to feed their HDTV, I suggest waiting for the bugs to be worked out.
