GEOFFREY MORRISON BLOG

First Look: Toshiba HD-XA1

By Gary Merson

The high-definition disc era began on April 15, when the first HD DVD players arrived at local stores. Now a sample of the HD-XA1 is in my hands. During the past week, articles have appeared about HD DVD. The ones I have seen have generally (and wrongly) regarded this as a souped up DVD player or as if it is just a DVD player on steroids with a blue-violet laser. While the form factor is the same and both play regular DVDs, that is about where the similarities end. This is not a DVD player. Based on photos and videos of the insides (I’m not dissecting this one until I write a complete review), it’s actually a computer with an HD DVD drive, brilliantly disguised as an oversized standard-definition DVD player.

Inside is a 2.5-gigahertz computer (according to reports), and it behaves as one. I timed the boot-up from turning on, to disc insertion, to HD picture at 1minute 35 seconds. That’s faster than my PC but slow if you think it’s and old-fashioned DVD player. The great news: This is the best high-definition picture I have ever seen in home use. The discs I have looked at, Serenity and The Last Samurai are stunning. Its not just the high-definition clarity—it’s the freedom from MPEG compression artifacts, edge enhancement, and other garbage that gets magnified on big screen displays using standard-def DVDs. Are there issues? You betcha. Most involve audio and some of the functions, and I will cover them in a future review. But the picture, on a big-screen HDTV, is incredible!