Yes that’s what Ultimate AV’s Shane C. Buettner had to say (”Best HD image quality available on any format”) about HD DVD in his Toshiba HD-XA1 review. Now in all fairness he also noted the first generation players aren’t lightning fast loaders and do suffer from minor hang-ups, but take a look at some other comments from Mr. Buettner.

The image quality is, in short, everything we’ve hoped it could be, and represents a significant challenge to Blu-ray or any other format that comes down the pike. The picture is unequivocally the best I’ve seen in my home from any HD source. DirecTV is my broadcast HD source, and sometimes presentations on Showtime HD, Discovery HD, and the HDNet channels approach this level of quality, but they don’t quite get there

HD DVDs are unequivocally more film-like in the complete elimination of compression artifacts, motion artifacts, and certainly in the depth of the image and more convincing color saturation. In fact, I couldn’t see just how prevalent these artifacts are with DVD until watching these discs and noticing that they’d simply vanished. And again, even compared to the best broadcast HD I’ve seen the level of clarity is a clear and mighty cut above with the best discs.

Read Ultimate AV’s Toshiba HD-XA1HD DVD Player review, in full.

R.Hollis

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 9:35 am and is filed under HD-DVD, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.