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Returned my hd dvd player already.

152.163.101.10

Posted by Greg T on April 28, 2006 at 13:20:08

I bought an HD-A1 from BB the saturday before there were supposed to start selling them.

It has a decent build for a 500.00 player, as well as a decent look.
The player was about as loud as my pc...which is a 2 year old average Dell.
It has a great picture on hd dvd...but it was a bit soft, and not as sharp as the better d-vhs titles....but definitley better than sd dvd.
The audio, at least on all the first Warner titles when played via coax or optical is DD+...which has too much bandwidth evidently so it is output in some higher than normal bit rate DD....but the kicker is that everyones gear reads it as DTS...which is not even on the discs.
When hooked up via coax/optical...its down 15db from the sd dvd version at the same volume setting.

When hooked up via anolog 5.1 or hdmi, the DD+ audio is an improvement over even double bit rate DD/DTS.
It is still down a bit on db via analog or hdmi on Warner titles...but no were near 15db...probably 3-4db at the most.

So you can get better video and audio out of these players using analog/hdmi...and only the 1080i setting regardless of your displays native rate.
The problem for me was that its very finicky with hdmi errors as well as very sensitive to hum via the analog 5.1.
Mine never frooze during playback like some have said, but it did freeze up while trying to start a movie twice.
The player while in hd dvd mode, will revert back to the beggining of the movie anytime you push menu/stop, or basically any function other than pause.
So it does not remember were you left off in the movie as claimed, and in my case, not only did the player start the movie from the beggining, it also made my pj re-sync with any function other than pause/play.

I never tried one of the few Universal titles available, but there said to be at the correct db level....which could cause you to damage your speakers when switching from a Warner movie and using optical/coax as your connection.
On one rental sd dvd disc, the player would not play it, so I opened the drawer and tried again.
This time it asked me whether I wanted to check the hd box...or dvd box, evidently thinking I had an hd dvd hybrid disc, which are not even out yet.
The players are slow at everything including loading, playback, advance chapter ect....and I mean slow as in 2.5-3 seconds for chapter advance....and what seems like quite a few minutes to go from off, to playing an hd dvd.

One pleasant suprise was the sd dvd playback, which looked just shy of my previous Denon 3910, and current Onkyo sp 1000 for picture quality...with normal audio playback via optical/coax.

I may have missed a few quirks...but these were enough to negate the picture quality as well as the DD+ sound via analog.
I just kept thinking what new problems would I run into with this thing in the future.
Many people seem to keep them despite suffering all, or most of the same quirks...so I guess I was not chomping at the bit as badly after all.
I am going to wait for Blu Ray ...and possibly buy another hd dvd player down the road if Universal still doesn't support BLu Ray at that time.
If I do end up with another, hopefully most or all of these quirks/problems will be gone.

Greg

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