Santa brought us a Toshiba HD-DVD player. It’s the A3 model, which included two HD DVD movies in the box. Santa must have picked it up at Best Buy, because the receipt also comes with five more free discs, a sort of mail-in rebate deal.

Got it set up, plugged into the 42” Panasonic plasma-screen via HDMI connection, and was off and running pretty quickly. Overall I’m pleased– but there have been a few glitches. Ended up playing a LOT of movies through it in the last week or so, with varied results:

THE SUBLIME: The first disc we slipped into the A3 was 300, which came with the player. It looked remarkable, and played flawlessly. The image was so detailed it became easy to see the density differences between the live-action and effect elements in the film, something that was not all that easy to spot even on a big screen (and I saw it originally in IMAX)

A few days later, I got a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey, my hands-down favorite film. I have purchased this same movie many times, forever seeking an adequate approximation of the roadshow 70mm experience : The standard CLV laserdisc, the deluxe CAV boxed laserdisc, the Kubrick Collection DVD and the deluxe boxed DVD. The laserdiscs suffered the limitations of that format: soft, analog video and hard letterboxing, and in my opinion both the standard NTSC DVD versions of 2001 look remarkably bad, lots of compression artifacts, greenish blacks and low contrast. The HD DVD version is, not to mince words, a whole new f***ing ballgame. Gorgeous, saturated colors; insanely detailed images (count Kier Dullea’s gray hairs! You can read all the text in HAL 9000’s readouts!), Great 5.1 audio; nice extras. This is the first video version of 2001 that, I belives, delivers the majesty, mystery and artistic precision of Kubrick’s masterpiece.

THE SUPERIOR: Some of the films we had on-hand were not designed as spectacles but were served nicely by HD DVD. Goodfellas, A pre-digital film from 1991, is rendered in a form that is remarkably true to it’s original format. It’s the sort of story that sort of doesn’t really need an HD version to improve it, but nonetheless it’s crisp and watchable.

THE SURPRISING: I put a few Christmas-gift Standard-def NTSC discs in the player to try out the 1080i up-res features of the player. Both of them are traditional-style animation, which I’ve found is a good test of the disc’s authoring (animation being comprised of pure colors and sharp lines). The Simpsons Movie actually showed some flaws. A lot of the lines were haloed with compression artifacts, and some fields of color looked blocky. I chalked this up to the signal and display chain: 1080i up-res to a plasma-screen is going to show NTSC for what it is, warts and all. The next one on was Futurama: Bender’s Big Score, the direct-to-DVD movie. It looked so good, it may as well have been in HD. The flaws seen in The Simpsons Movie were absent: just rich, noiseless colors and clean line art. I liked both films quite a bit, but if you’re a “Futurama” fan you have to check out Bender’s Big Score: it’s very funny and written with a wonderful complexity. And it might be good to see it before Comedy Central chops it up into four episodes for broadcast.

THE SUB-PAR: Two HD-DVD discs– Training Day and Letters From Iwo Jima– had showstopping flaws in them. At specific points in the program the discs would groink out, the screen would go black and an arcane error message (”ERROR 408ab553″ or such) would display. These bad discs were either damaged or possibly the player’s firmware needs to be upgraded.

Another disappointment occurred when I put an all-region PAL disc in the A3: It wouldn’t play. Most standard-def DVD players internally transcode PAL for NTSC output, and vice-versa. This is because, interestingly, most studio films are 24p video: resampling this to NTSC or PAL is part of the spec. Not having PAL playback capability is a big step backwards.

As I said I’m pretty pleased overall, but that applies to HD disc formats generally. In terms of the actual viewing experience Blu-Ray and HD DVD are identical, and now the studio camps are even more equally matched then before (Warner Bros. puts out content in both formats, and they have the volume to be the deciding factor if they go one way or another). Outside of available content it’s still tough to choose. For that reason I prefer HD DVD: If Santa had gone Blu-Ray, I’d still be waiting to see 2001 the way it was meant to.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Digital Wonderland, General, Hosts, Motion Pictures, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.