Digital Trends

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

Features and Design 

It may not look as cool as one of those Blu-ray players, but the HD-A20 isn’t crippled and can play CDs as well as home-brewed discs (but no JPEG, MP3 or other music files). Like all HD DVD players, it’s much deeper than a standard DVD player and is also more “PC” in how it functions - so things like the fast forward being jerky on this model is unchanged from those that came out before it. However, there have been some improvements - it weights half as much as the first generation HD-A1 and the basic star-tup sequence has improved. Still, you’ll be waiting up to a minute for the disc to pop out for insertion, and another dozens of seconds for the image to begin playing. The worst part of all this is that if you make a mistake and hit the Stop button now or at any future time (instead of Pause). the disc will start all over again from the beginning. Another bummer is the remote. True it’s lighter and more responsive than earlier models, but it’s missing backlighting or even glow-in-the-dark capabilities to aid in finding the right button to press. Since there’s a whole lot of these tiny guys, that makes using it in the dark really difficult.

Installation/Setup 

You’ll want to use the HDMI connection if you can because it allows for full 1080p resolution as well as transmitting audio. The only outputs for audio on the player are an Optical out and a pair of RCA for ste-reo, so using the HDMI port is the only way to gain the new high-def audio formats like Dolby Digital+. Since there are no analog outputs for audio, the downside of this player is that unless your amp has HDMI inputs, there’s no accessing these formats. 

Also be sure to insert an Ethernet cable into the LAN port so the player can join your network and access the Internet. Without a network, you won’t be able to download firmware updates or watch additional con-tent from selected HD DVD discs taken off of the Internet (but the player can be used to play discs even without the connection).

We first attached the HDMI output on the A20 to a Denon amp that has HDMI inputs and which is sending the video signal to a 56” Samsung LED 1080p Rear-projection display. Turning the player on, the first thing we’ll do is go to the Setup menu and set the aspect ratio to 16:9 (rather than 4:3 or letterbox) and the resolution to 1080p (we’re leaving off all the other enhancements such as noise reduction, etc. as we prefer to do fine-tuning at the display). Going to the network settings, we tell the Toshiba to automatically join the network, which it does. This will be the case for pretty much everybody and really makes the whole process easier than having to manually input router and ISP settings. Now that the network is onboard - the player lets us know that there’s a firmware update to download. Giving it the OK, the player begins to the process and finishes about 15 minutes later (shutting itself off when done). Turning the player back on, we check that the settings haven’t been affected (they aren’t), and go to the Audio settings to make sure that HDMI is selected so that it can process any sound formats it encounters.

The back of the Toshiba HD-A20