They do have this small movie called, Transformers,I think?!!

I don't read Hunt's articles so I have no idea what his opinion was. I think $200 for the A3 will be fine, but they were $299 in Wal-mart and Best Buy.

I think this was a good move for HD DVD and like I said earlier I'm now hearing many people talking about HD DVD that never seemed to even mention HDTV or their home theater. However, I think Toshiba has to stay aggressive and I hope they continue to get more players in store ads for under $200.

$99 is obviously the mass market price point so Toshiba should really just bite the bullet and sell their low end at $99 from now on. This war would be over in a matter of months if they did this.

As a complete newcomer to hi def formats, I jumped on the HD DVD bandwagon in the last week.

However, looking at current and particularly upcoming titles, there is MUCH more on BRD that I'd buy than on HD DVD. But the player prices are keeping me from getting a BRD player. I won't consider it until they are at $300, and wouldn't buy a standalone (non-PS3) until they are at $200. Hopefully we see that sooner than later.

Yup BD does have the advantage when it comes to upcoming titles. Hopefully we see some aggressive measures taken by the BDA in the upcoming weeks.

The HD-A2 and A3's only do up to 1080i... so does BluRay have a comparable "lower level" unit (at least in terms of tech specs)? or is it that ALL BluRay units do full 1080p, thus the high price is "somewhat" warranted, as we are comparing apples and oranges, and that the true equivilent on the HD-DVD side of things is at LEAST the HD-A20 which is about $300-400 bucks? Sure, Walmart shopping J6P won't care, but still... is this the case?

But if you own an LCD TV that does 1080P it upconverts the 1080i players, so it's not really an issue. Or at least that's how I heard it.

I have a ps3 and had been waiting for a Toshiba price drop. Yesterday, I walked out of Walmart with two $99 players (one for me, one for parents), and my thought-would-be-cancelled Best Buy order was upgraded to a $99 A3. It is a slight pain supporting both formats (in terms of my semi-limited home theater setup), but now when someone can go format neutral for under $500 ... it seems worth it to be able to see almost any new release in HD, regardless of studio.

Well, 1080i is a moot point since most 1080p tvs are going deinterlace it and send it back as 1080p. That's the reason why I went with an A2 and an A3 since both my LCDs are fairly new and can do that.

The discs are encoded 1080p so as long as your 1080p TV does a decent job of upconverting you are losing nothing. Even some of the players that claimed to have 1080p output like the first Samsung BD player were cheating and taking 1080i and upconverting it to 1080p inside the player. Either way the difference is not really notable.

If I had a 1080p projector though I would want a player that did real 24fps 1080p output. If that is in your budget though the player cost probably won't matter.

I hope we get big price cuts like that over here in the UK. HD-DVd is dominant in Europe anyway. But $99 players is like £47 ain't that like them paying you to take it off them?

Ofc we'd never see those kind of prices in the UK. I wonder if i can import

On-topic i'ved been following this format war from the beginning and several times i'ved nearly plunged into Blu-ray, yet HD-DVD have done something to make me yet again hold my wallet closed.

But I can say that J6P (Joe six pack right? ) will buy these players as they are finally at the general publics price point. And Blu-ray just cannot compete on that price. Gz to Toshiba for this deal. If they win the war the sole company is gonna be rolling in it....

Bear in mind unlike Playstation 2 the PS3 is being beaten senseless by the xbox 360 and Wii.

not quite so simple.
I have a Sony VW50 (Pearl) which is a 1080p pj- but it is 1080p/60
the 24fps capability of my Sony BDP300 is completely lost on this pj.
are there any pjs currently that are 1080p/24 native? Likely what you will get is 1080p/120 which will provides clean multiples of both 24 and 30

I thought some of the higher end ones where, but you are probably right. I was probably thinking of 1080p/120. So either way you still have some kind of conversion going on though it should look a bit better with 120.

Bluray has better technical specs, on paper.

So far, bluray cannot match what every HD-DVD player ever released can do.

Once Bluray profile 2.0 players are out and functional, THEN maybe Bluray will have a real advantage. Right now, the advantage is HD DVD.

Yes, paying $500 for a PS3 and an HD DVD player and getting 10 movies out of it is ridiculous. If we only had one format we'd be getting 30 movies and it would only cost us $35.95. And software would be a nickel.

And Shrek 3, and Bourne Identity.

I'm just glad I got BD, so I can get my Swinmfan Blu-Ray!

(I actually liked that movie more than Spider-man).

+1.

I wonder how many of those $99 A2s get hooked up to a TV via a composite cable? ("Hey Marge, does this new HD DVD thing look any better to you? I don't get what all the fuss is about!")

I don't buy the notion that this move by Toshiba is some sort of death blow to BD. I don't see Sony giving up (after all they will have millions of Blu-ray capable PS3s in homes) and Fox and Disney seem pretty solid also. Toshiba is fighting for the life of its HD DVD format, with BD having had the better year thus far. My guess is that the best Toshiba can hope for is coexistence. That would be fine with me.

I don't think you'd want a 1080p/24 native display. Even film projectors display each frame at least twice, essentially making it 48 fps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_projector#Shutter

^I think the expectation is that a "1080p/24 native" display would actually be able to convert it to 1080p/72 (or the 1080p/120 Paul_SD mentioned). No 3:2 pulldown needed, just 3 repeats of each frame per second.

I, too, think that 24 fps might have a noticeable flicker.

I believe this IS a potential death blow to BD. A TON of people jumped off the format war fence in the past few days. Even a lot of BD backers picked up HDDVD players because, at $99, why not?

BD's arrogance is what's going to kill it. Right now, BD is being established in the mind of the mainstream consumer as ridiculously overpriced. BD has about 6 months to make some SERIOUS hardware price cuts, or they will lose this format war. There is NO WAY BD is going to win a format war when their cheapest player is four times the price of the cheapest HDDVD player, regardless of whether it doubles as a video game system. That's obvious. If BD doesn't start making the prices of its hardware VERY competitive, and darn soon, they will lose the war by next Christmas.

Player prices will win this war, not software prices. People aren't going to buy a player that costs hundreds of dollars more because of a few dollars savings on each DVD. The average consumer doesn't buy nearly enough DVDs for that to make sense.

Depending on how much money Sony wants to lose being stubborn, BD might survive as a niche technology, with a only a few titles released per year, for those who need to feel like they are smarter than "J6P". But HDDVD will be the clear mainstream format winner, the player in everyone's home, and the format on which every movie gets released. It's crisis time for BD, and it seems that most BD backers don't even realize it. I wonder if the execs at Sony do?...

Hey thanks for the FUD. If any format is considered niche, it's HD-DVD. A format that has hardware support from like one major company, and doesn't have the support of Disney, Fox, or Columbia Tristar.

It's just as FUDDY as your post. MrDs10e said "I believe" which means it's an opinion. Just like yours. If anything, BOTH formats are a niche.

I'm not sure either BD or HD should be trying label the other as niche ... pot calling kettle.

I like them both being niche. I kinda hope they stay that way I feel like I'm part of an exclusive club of people that are watching movies better than everyone else.

I felt the exact same way about DVD when it first came out. Let the masses watch their fullscreen VHS, while I watch my movies in widescreen, with 5.1 surround sound and loads of special features.

Now we lost the inserts and have to pay a preminum for that same bonus disc that used to come standard. Damn masses