Toshiba's HD-XA2 HD DVD player delayed until January

Toshiba has launched its first second generation HD DVD player, the HD-A2, but the more fully featured HD-XA2 will not see daylight until 2007. We had expected to see the player this year, but a dealer's post on AVS Forum indicates the first shipment isn't expected to hit until January 3rd due to production delays. AV Watch confirms the player has been pushed back to January in Japan as well, while the rest of the world should still see this hardware later on in the year. DTV Tivo Dealer on AVS Forum also noted that while 1080p/24 playback -- currently only an option in a couple of Blu-ray players -- won't make launch, he is "100% sure" a future firmware upgrade within a few months will add it as an option. That puts the $999 HD-XA2 on the long list of next gen players with future firmware updates on the way, but we'd settle for it actually being available in the first place.

Read - AVS Forum
Read - AV Watch

[hmurchison @ Dec 28th 2006 1:05PM]

I'm sure people can live with waiting for for a week to get this excellent player. Forget the 1080p/24 output. It's a non factor for %90 of the HDTV market which doesn't support 24/48/72 input.

The big news is the Silicon Optix Reon VX processor. Confirmation is in that thread about this feature and for those that don't know Silicon Optix Realta ($$$$) and Reon are the new darlings of movie playback processing.

For those people that though the HD-XA2 was just about 1080p outputs you can now rest assured that the XA2 is "Turbocharged" and will have plenty of benefits for the higher end home theatre.

[GhostDoggy @ Dec 29th 2006 4:22AM]

Why should consumers forget about getting the one output format the movies are recorded upon? Sounds like the DVD forum should have calculated this and with proper and appropriate predictive determination chose a storage format that was readily available.

But the reason behind chosing 24 fps is because that is the rate at which film is recorded in the United States, so I see no reason why continued support for legacy NTSC frame-rates should even worth considering.

And the only reason why few display products support 24 fps is because those products are designed to be either inexpensive, non-home theater products, or not meant to take a serious approach at reproducing the original film.

Considering the price is now above what entry-level Blu-ray players are being offered at, I think Toshiba will continue to see an up-hill battle in winning consumers over in the long-term.

[David Susilo @ Dec 28th 2006 2:19PM]

the picture and the unit in discussion are two completely different things. The unit in the picture is HD-A2, which is already released several weeks ago.

[Mark @ Dec 28th 2006 3:09PM]

Lets hope it's quieter and faster than the last Toshiba.. 2 minutes start-up time is ludicrous, but then it's a glorified PC anyway...

[Dave @ Dec 28th 2006 3:30PM]

nah, its still a poor PC based thing put in an ugly box... + ROM drive

[Spilt_Milk @ Dec 28th 2006 3:59PM]

Why on earth would anyone buy these stand alone pieces of crqap instead of just buying an Xbox 360 core and the $199 ad on hd dvd player?

[hmurchison @ Dec 28th 2006 4:03PM]

Because the Xbox with the add on doesn't support the TrueHD lossless audio features of the spec.

[Synnyster @ Jan 7th 2007 11:11PM]

The same reason people buy BMWs or Benz's as opposed to a Ford. Just because you can't afford or don't want to buy it doesn't mean there isn't a reason to. This piece of crap has analog outputs and 1080p output via HDMI.

[hmurchison @ Dec 28th 2006 3:56PM]

You speak as if PC is a always a pejorative term. I'd prefer a PC right now to a SoC design that simply wouldn't have the power to handle the Interactive layer and touch codecs like AVC.

The new A2 and this XA2 should be faster and I've read the fan is indeed quieter. Operation of the remote is smoother and the time from power on to disc playing is noticably shorter.

[Jason @ Dec 28th 2006 4:35PM]

The HD add on for the Xbox also doesn't support upconversion of regular SD DVDs over the component video connections.

Both the A2/XA2 have amazing upconversion capabilities over DVI/HDMI.

[net3400 @ Dec 29th 2006 4:13PM]

Ok, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to buy this Toshiba when it comes out. Why? Because every review I've read which compares HD-DVD and Blu-Ray says that currently HD-DVD looks better. There are two reasons given for this. Without going into the nitty gritty details, reason number one is that HD-DVD's can currently be recorded on two layers, giving a total available space of 30GB, whereas Blu-Ray disks are currently only recorded on one layer, giving a total available space of 25GB. The second reason, and the more important one is the compression used in each of the formats. Again, with out the dirty details, HD-DVD currently does a better job with compression than Blu-Ray, so the final product displayed to the screen looks better.

The other reason why I am going to buy this player is that I believe it will be several years before the format war is sorted out, and if it happens to get sorted out in Blu-Ray's favor, then I will simply buy a Blu-Ray player at that time and keep my HD-DVD player for the HD-DVD movies that I already own.

[ziXXer @ Jan 6th 2007 9:20PM]

I have both a Blu-ray and HD-DVD player hooked up to my dual HDMI HDTV. Why? Each unit has exclusive titles...I don't want to miss out. They look to me about the same except when in scenes with a lot of motion. My $550 HD-DVD player doesn't support 1080p.

net3400: The first dual-layer Blu-ray disc (50 GB) became available in mid-October with the release of "Click". Since then, about 20 other films have used this capability.

Furthermore, with this extra 20 GB of space Blu-ray is able to keep everything (including special features) in 1080p.