Product Reviews

HD-DVD certainly has a price advantage over Blu-ray: Toshiba's HD-E1 player is almost half the cost of Samsung's BD-P1000 Blu-ray player, reviewed right. Unfortunately, the design and build quality feel similar to DVD players costing £200 less. The black fascia will look out of place in many living rooms, and the remote is boxy with a confusing button layout.

As with the BD-P1000, startup times are appalling. It took over a minute from pressing the power button for us to get an image on our LCD TV. The player's menu system reacts quickly to inputs, however, as did the in-disc menus. Video quality is excellent, although this is more dependent on the discs and how they're encoded. Fortunately, most HD-DVD discs use the more advanced H.264 HD video codec. Blu-ray has several titles out using the older MPEG2 codec (as used by DVD), which don't look anywhere near as good.

Blu-ray has the advantage in disc size, though, as its two-layer discs can store up to 50GB of data with a transfer rate of 40Mbit/s. HD-DVD can store only up to 30GB of data with a transfer rate of 29.4Mbit/s. This means Blu-ray can store more video at a higher quality than HD-DVD. The HD-E1 supports 720p and 1080i outputs,

ADVERTISEMENT

but not 1080p. However, a decent HD TV can reconstruct the 1080p 24fps video from the 1080i video that the HD-E1 outputs; go to http://tinyurl.com/23zlhj for details on how this works.

The HD-E1 has both HDMI and component outputs for HD video. The HDMI is version 1.2 and so lossless formats such as Dolby TrueHD must be converted to PCM before being relayed to a compatible home cinema receiver. Alternatively, the player can convert audio to Dolby Digital or DTS, and output them through the optical S/PDIF. A stereo phono output is also present.

In addition to the video and audio outputs, there is an Ethernet port on the back. This allows access to specially designed websites and interactive features from the menu of an HD-DVD movie. You can also download firmware updates to ensure that your player is always up to date.

Unusually, there are two USB ports on the front; these are apparently for 'additional control options' as future discs may include games or multimedia software. We tried the HD-E1 on a pair of widescreen computer monitors. The first didn't have HDCP and we failed to get the menu to appear. The second had HDCP and we got a 720p picture with no problem.

Currently HD DVD has no region-coding scheme, so you can play any disc from any country on this player. However, the HD-DVD forum has started work on a region-coding scheme following movie studio pressure. There's currently no information on how the new scheme will affect early players such as this one.

The HD-E1 is a great player and almost half the price of the cheapest Blu-ray player. Even so, £319 is a lot to gamble on a format that might fail. If you want to try out HD movies, Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player is the cheapest way to do it if you already have the games console.