Toshiba HD-A1 High Definition DVD Player

[Roger]

Introduction

Believe it or not, High Definition has been around for now for a long time. I remember seeing HD displays at local electronics stores over seven years ago. I bought my first HDTV six years ago, and I've owned several since.

Even though HD displays have been commonplace in our electronics market for years, content has been slow to develop, mainly because upgrading to HD broadcasting equipment is so expensive.

Cable and satellite TV were a bit late to adopt, and even now there isn't a huge amount of content to sift through. Much of the content we do have is either cropped, zoomed, scaled, or compressed to death, making the experience well short of what it could and should be. What the market has really lacked to get the HD ball rolling is pre-recorded high quality content.

Well that high quality content has arrived. We are at the forefront of what will hopefully be a revolution in video playback. Pre-recorded high definition has been limited to the largely unsuccessful and short-lived D-Theater format (tape) up until now. D-Theater did offer extremely good high definition video and high bit rate audio, but its limited availability, high price, and tape-based delivery system just did not score well with the average consumer. Even among HT enthusiasts, you won't find a lot of support. But now, two HD disc formats are going to battle it out for your dollars, and Toshiba has fired the first shot in the battle for a consumer friendly pre-recorded HD format with HD DVD.

HD DVD was developed by Toshiba and NEC, and is based on the already popular DVD format. Unlike traditional DVD, HD DVD can utilize a blue laser, allowing it to read an even smaller pit area on a disc. This allows for a dramatic rise in capacity. A single layer HD DVD disc can hold 15 gigabytes worth of data and a dual layered single sided disc can hold 30 gigabytes. That is over three times the amount of data that a dual layered DVD can hold! Because of this, and some other factors, movies can be mastered at high definition resolutions and deliver images and sound that have not been possible with the standard DVD format. Notice that I said sound as well as images. Not only will we have high definition video content, but the audio will be lossless multi-channel. That means the surround sound will actually be better than a conventional CD, with 24 bit/96 kHz tracks.

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