Speaking of, where the hell is he?

He hasn't posted in 5 days and I NEED my Edit King fix!

Chris

Selling out all over it appears. Only 20,000 or so players available I heard so that is a drop in the bucket. Xbox360 had around 300,000 ready to go the first day out if I remember correctly.
My Best Buy sold their players all on Saturday. Wonder how fast they will re-stock? Anyone seen the more expensive Toshiba player? I thought they were coming out at the same time, but I haven't heard anyone talking about it.

It's Edit Queen. Get it right.

I've heard it's been delayed a couple of months. Seems that some of the features that were going to be solely on that unit was actually put on the cheaper one. I believe the ethernet connection was originally not part of the HD-A1 unit, but it's there.

As far as restocking, I think it could take a few weeks. Amazon.com hasn't received any in ever. Their first shipment is coming in June.

All articles I have read say 4-6 weeks, with no formal date given to retailers.

Interesting post from avsforum:

Well, in a few days I will be an owner of the Toshiba HD player. I just ordered one online from Amazon.com....they were selling them for "OneCall". Not tax or shipping. I hope it gets here by Friday, but I have a feeling FedEx will not deliver until Monday or Tuesday. I'm very excited. Phantom of the Opera will be arriving tomorrow. I will most likely purchase Last Samurai and Million Dollar Baby (I think this releases tomorrow). I have a feeling my dvd buying habits will slow down considerably, especially if new stuff is released day and date with dvd.

I've been soley in the HD-DVD camp, so it's no suprise I adopted early. I'll be more excited when Kong, and some of the other newer titles show up. Right now, BR has more support, but I refuse to pay $1000 to watch high-definition content and the PS3 is not here yet. So, I'm taking a risk like everyone else. But I think both formats will be around for at least a year. By that time, I should have a nice library built up. If at that time HD-DVD loses out, then I'll get a BR player, but only if its price is cut in half and I guess I'll treat my HD unit as a collector's item, but I'm gonna enjoy it while it's here.

It's pathetic they couldn't agree on 1 format, but I'm obviously rooting for HD to win out so I don't have to buy another player. I love my dvd library, but I know once this new player shows up, I'll start looking down upon it. I'll be tempted to start unloading them and only keep the important titles like the Classic Monster sets or the Hitchcock Collection. But for now, I'm gonna hold onto to everything until this format war starts to shake out a bit. Oh well, bring on the HD content.

please, oh please, let us know what you think of this HiDef version.

I will. I've never seen the movie. I only have a 30" display, but it's a Sony 16:9 HD CRT and produces terrific images and the color is great. As soon as I get the player, I'll post my thoughts.

HD content via my cable looks amazing on it, so at least I'll kinda have something to compare this unit to.

Has anyone seen any of the all-black players out at Wal-Mart yet?

I think those are supposed to show up on the 21st and should be the next batch of players to get. Don't know when other retailers will get more HD-A1s.

Granted it's only been a two days of release, has anyone seen online reviews for any of the four HD-DVD titles? I know that the Digital Bits, has some initial thoughts, but I am eager to see and read other's reviews as well.

There was never scheduled to be any electronic or feature differences between the HD-A1 and HD-XA1. The differences are soley in build quality and cosmetics. Toshiba's been using the XA1 at all of their road show demos, and that's the model they distributed to retailers for in-store display, so I doubt there's anything holding it up other than lack of demand. I can't imagine there are really too many people willing to pay an extra $300 for a motorized front panel and backlit remote when otherwise the two players are basically identical.

Don't forget gold-plated connectors.

The HD-A1 has gold plated connectors as well. The XA1 has RS-232C though.

FedEx will be delivering mine on Monday. Damn, I was hoping I'd have it for the weekend. This will be the first time ever that I hope Monday gets here quickly.

My Best Buy had a HD-DVD Player hooked up to a 26' Insignia Tv...ugh.

Mine had it hooked up to a 50" Pioneer plasma set, complete with surround sound, right in the middle of the video department, with a couple of nice leather chairs set up for viewing.

This new HD DVD player has been getting a lot of positive buzz from early adopters. I wasn't interested in jumping in so early, but I think they have convinced me!

Mine will be out for delivery tommorow!!!

So I just went on my lunch break to Best Buy here in Chelsea to check it out for myself...again. If you will recall, I saw it on the original "tour." They had it set up for 720P on a Westinghouse flat screen.

Let me tell you, I have NO idea how the hell they sold them on that demo.

It looked like absolute shit. No joke.

The demo was running that showed HD/SD and they looked almost the same. The coloring was off. Everything just looked like crap.

Now, again, the demo I saw was nothing short of astonishing but if they're going to sell them to people, why the hell are they putting it on something like this? They go through all the trouble to put it on an endcap and use a full-page ad in their weekly flyer to promote it but then it looks like crap.

Regardless, they're sold out and the drone had no idea when they'd get more. I did notice the slow load time...but the whole experience just soured me on the idea...even though I know what it can really be like. I would just like to see it set up properly from someone who knows what they're talking about before I bite.

There were two other guys there that were looking at them for a client of theirs apparently. They actually disconnected it from the HDMI and tried to hook it up via component but it didn't work. The salesperson came by and asked them what they were doing and said it took them "hours to set up." i wanted to ask him why it took hours to plug in 2 cords.

I started talking to the guys. It was cute. They thought Blu-Ray was going to cost $800. They were talking about some Panasonic model that would be around that price. Uhh..no. Try around $1400 from what I've heard. They didn't believe me that the Sony would be the cheapest until PS3 came out. Whatever. It's amazing how much incorrect information is out there about these players.

Oh and i forgot the best part...

Someone stole the remote...or they lost it. Either way, it's gone.

All they had to do was push the V. Output button on the remote. If they had the remote.

DVD File posted some info about the Toshiba player. This part has me a tad concerned:

"It’s also been reported that there is a bit of an audio glitch in these early players. Toshiba is transcoding any Dolby Digital+ audio track to DTS 5.1 for the S/PDIF output used to drive the digital input on your existing audio decoders. The conversion process is apparently causing a considerable drop in audio amplitude. I’ll try to research this further; I suspect it may be caused by an over-simplified algorithm that doesn’t scale as it transcodes audio from a larger digital dynamic range to a smaller digital dynamic range."

Is this a major concern?