Digital Trends

Toshiba HD-A20 October 7th, 2007 | by Marshal M. Rosenthal

Evaluation 

We’ll start by seeing how well the HD-A20 handles DVDs. Once inserted in the tray, the disc comes up as fast as if it was in a regular DVD player - with all of the functions working as you’d expect them to. Running the HQV test disc, the results show that the HD-A20 scales and upconverts to 1080p with reasona-ble quality overall; doing a good job at color reproduction, noise reduction and maintaining detail. But it could do a whole lot better at handling “jaggies” (such as what you’d see in a rippling flag or a spinning clock hand), so we have to give it a 6 out of 10 there. 

But since test patterns aren’t what people watch, we’ll put in the DVD of Creature Comforts America, which hand-animates clay figures. The video quality of the images looks smooth and free from artifacting overall, and we can even see cracks and smudges on some of the clay figures (think how much more glaring they’d be in HD!). For something faster paced, we’re riveted watching the climactic car duel in Death Proof, as the player resolves all the action of two cars insanely crashing into each other at high speed. You can probably catch the player’s disadvantage at controlling “jaggies” if you stare hard enough, but the eye tends to be forgiving when it comes to action movies anyway.

Oppo 981HD Remote (left) & Toshiba HD-A20 Remote (right)

Time for HD DVD 

There’s really nothing to comment on about the audio other than it sounds as good as any Dolby Digital track - so we’ll move on to the HD DVD version of Digital Video Essentials, whose highly mastered scenes lets us compare and calibrate sharpness, color and other aspects of the video image in 1080p; and which shows that this player resolves high-definition quite well. Playing episodes from the first sea-son HD DVD box set of the TV series Heroes, exteriors are sharp and crisp, with color brilliant and mod-erate in contrast so that the plentiful detail is not being smudged. We also watched some scenes from the newly released HD DVD of Top Gun and while there is some grain in the film due to its age, the image is still very detailed.

To see how flesh tones stack up, we switched to the comedy Knocked Up. Colors are spot-on and the overall image is crisp, without any “noise” in the sky or other distractions. We’re also able to access the web-enabled features without any problems - the disc lets you download and view unseen clips from the movie along with other Universal content. We should also add that Dolby Digital+ sounds impressive, but frankly if you’ve a good sound system, then even listening to the “old” audio format of Dolby Digital is great.

Conclusions 

The biggest obstacle to getting HD discs into homes has been the high price of the players - something that the HD-A20 effectively eliminates. While its use as a regular DVD player could be far better, you’re buying it for how splendidly it displays HD discs after all (plus updated features such as 24 frames per second can be added via online updates, and in fact have been). So if you’ve been hesitant to jump into the high-def pool, now’s your chance to get a HD DVD player that won’t let you down.

Pros: 

• High-resolution image
• Provides full 1080p resolution
• Ethernet port for networked content
• Reasonable price
• Multi-disc playback capabilities
• Internet connection for updates and added content

Cons: 

• Lack of analog outputs for the new audio formats
• Average performance when playing regular DVDs
• Inactive USB ports
• Remote difficult to use in dim light