Digital Trends

Toshiba has long been a pioneer and innovator of television and video. Let's not forget that Toshiba was responsible for the creation of the DVD in 1997. Today, things aren’t any different with Toshiba’s introduction of the first HD DVD players. High-definition DVD players have been in development for the past several years, using a blue/purple laser instead of the red one that is used in standard-definition DVD players. This review focuses on Toshiba's second-generation HD DVD player — the HD-XA2. I had the opportunity of reviewing the first-generation offering, and I can say definitely that the new XA2 is superior in every way.

Following the lead of King Kong, Toshiba introduced its first two HD DVD players last summer. Both of those models offered similar features and 1080i output. While the 1080i images looked really good, the operation of the player was terrible. At that time, it took close to one minute and 45 seconds for the player to initialize an HD DVD, which was unacceptable. Surprisingly, even though the first-generation players had a slow start-up time, images were still excellent in every way and compared favorably to Samsung's first-generation Blu-ray Disc player. In fact, image quality on HD DVD was superior to Blu-ray at the time.

 

Last summer, Toshiba saw that there were problems with its first-generation offering and began working to fix them. Simply put, it completely redesigned its top-of-the-line player and added some exemplary features. The defects of their XA1 were corrected for their HD-XA2, including the slow start-up time.

 

Now, there are several differences between the first-generation and second-generation models. First of all, the XA2 is 1080p versus 1080i, which makes the image quality even more superior than before. Secondly (and more importantly), the XA2 loads a disc like a DVD player, meaning that it takes about 15 seconds or so for a disc to load into the player. It's like night and day; the XA2 acts like a normal DVD player.