Toshiba players define what HD DVD is all about
Getting an early look at the brand new HD DVD movie players from Toshiba last week stands out as one of the best perks this perk-blessed technology reviewer has enjoyed for a great long while.
Up front, this is pretty expensive stuff as the long-awaited high-definition DVD players reach the marketplace and even as outfits like Toshiba continue to feud with rivals like Sony over which format to employ.
The Toshiba product I will cover, the company’s spectacular $2,999 (suggested retail) Qosmio G35-AV650 portable computer, uses a format called HD DVD while Sony and allies proffer players in a format called Blu-ray. The 2 formats are incompatible. If you wanna play, you gotta take sides.
This conflict over the formats for these great new DVDs threatens to put early adopters in the same bind that we encountered three decades ago when Sony’s Betamax eventually gave way to the VHS videotape format.
So it’s a real shame that these modern guys can’t learn to play well with the other children either, because the new products deliver blow-your-socks-off movie watching.
Toshiba’s demo unit came with a promotional disc with trailers for recent action-movie hits, including “King Kong,” “Sahara,” “Serenity,” “Batman Returns” and “Doom.”
There also was a clip in which a split screen displays a regular DVD playing on one side of a digital TV and an HD DVD playing on the otherside.
The movie clips were mighty persuasive but the best part of the pitch was a segment showing a castle with tourists approaching along a gravel embedded pathway under a cloudless blue sky. The scene was beautiful enough on the conventional DVD side but, as the narrator explained, the HD DVD’s display alongside was like putting on a new pair of eyeglasses. The conventional high-quality display suddenly seemed slightly out of focus–hazy is a good word.
By contrast, the HD DVD shot showed every rock in the gravel pathway and every crack in the castle’s brick facade. Subjectively, it seemed better than my living room HD plasma television set.
The clips, which it’s well to remember were selected for the purpose of showing off, included a Greek cruise ship started in the relatively hazy but still spectacular regular display on the right and moved across the line into the HD DVD display. As it crossed the line I could suddenly see things like dents in the hull, rust splotches and even spots on the painted vessel name where the artist colored a tad outside the lines.
To continue this rapturous description, I need to address the simulated surround sound Dolby 5.1 audio part of the show.
A set of Harman Kardon speakers built into the case of Toshiba’s Qosmio super laptop (10 pounds and 15 1/2 inches wide) make sitting in front of the screen like a good seat in a top movie theater. It did pretty well with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony too.
The jury remains out on whether the added expense for both the DVDs and the players will be deemed worth these delightful experiences right away, but it’s crystal clear that everybody who plays movies at home is going to get an HD player after the companies make peace over formats and when prices drop out of the stratosphere.
The lowest price for a Toshiba HD DVD machine is a dedicated player, the $499 Toshiba HD A1 model. That’s about 5 times more than the going rate for stand-alone dedicated DVD players and there’s a chance that the HD DVD format won’t prevail.
These dragged-out format fights are pretty common wherever inventors and other geniuses do their stuff. It took a decade for the various manufacturers and distributors to accept the single digital standard now used universally in today’s flat-screen plasma and LCD HD television sets. Now we must endure a fight over the DVDs we’ll play on those screens, as well as on top-of-the-line portables like the Qosmio or Sony’s competing Blu-ray Vaio models.
The Qosmio is much more than just a DVD machine, and a lot of folks may find even the $2,999 suggested retail price worth the freight, as I’ll explain.
If ever there was something designed to make a dormitory room habitable, it’s this Qosmio, which includes a 17 1/2-inch (diagonal) screen capable of resolutions of 1920 by 1200 pixels and those already-mentioned superb Harman Kardon built-in speakers. It has a TV tuner as well, and serves like a TiVo on steroids when connected to a cable TV wire.
Parents who worry about sending their offspring into dorms and apartments with expensive and easily misplaced laptops should recall that this machine weighs 10 pounds with a slot for a steel cable lock that can be handcuffed to a radiator or a heavy desk.
If it sounds like I’m shilling a bit heavily for Toshiba, it’s worth remembering that a stand-alone digital television set still costs in the $900 to $2,000 neighborhood. And then there are TiVo costs.
The Qosmio boasts a 200-gigabyte hard drive that makes it perfect for storing captured videos along with MP3 and other music files.
Oh yes, with a 2 gigahertz Intel Core Duo processor, it also does homework pretty well.
Source: http://www.latimes.com/technology/