[Richard W. Haines]

I guess look for the remaining HD DVD discs at giveaway prices over the next couple of months. I'll try to
grab "Adventures of Robin Hood", "Under Siege", "Blazing Saddles" and the "Star Trek" TV series
when that happens. I was able to watch a number of the HD DVD titles and they looked and
sounded great including "2001", "Mutiny on the Bounty", "Trading Places", "Superman", "Animal
House" and "Willy Wonka". So I'll use the machine until it dies since it upscales Standard DVDs
nicely although when there was a glitch on the "Rockford Files" disc it wouldn't play it and I
had to switch to the Samsung player which will play anything. I'll wait until there's a decent
selection of Blu-ray discs out there that I actually want to own before purchasing a player.
Right now the selection is so small it's not worth the investment. Let's see what the studios
plan for release in the future since all of the old lists are now obsolete. I was looking forward
to the proposed Warner HD DVD discs of "The Music Man" and "North by Northwest" which will
hopefully now be released on Blu-ray in the near future. Both were filmed on similar large format
negatives (35mm horizontal negative with an eight sprocket image) and should look very sharp in high definition. It will also give me time to recover from getting ripped off on the Toshiba player.
Not really Toshiba's fault but certainly the industry's fault for not standardizing HD before it's
introduction to protect consumers although I doubt whether that is a concern for most studios.