I picked one up at Fry's last night (Saturday). I asked about their return policy as I was worried that I wouldn't be impressed with a 1080i plasma display.

I'm keeping it, it looks great.

I'm on the fence about picking one up, so hopefully someone who already has one can answer a noobie question. I have a 52" Sony widescreen, and at this point, I'd say I have 6-8 dead or stuck pixels scattered around the screen. When I watch normal DVDs, they are completely unnoticeable. But with the improved quality of high-def, would they suddenly stand out to me in certain scenes? I'd hate to buy the player only to be frustrated by the dead pixels all of a sudden.

Your best bet would be to stream over some of these HD trailers and see if you notice them.

http://www.drfoster.f2s.com/trailers_hd-dvd.shtml

Or you can just download some of the HD trailers on Xbox Live and see. They aren't as good of quality, but probably good enough.

Even so, I doubt you are going to notice 6-8 random dead pixels. I'm sure if they were all grouped together you would though.

the remote that comes with it doesn't control the hd drive at all, going to have to use the controller. Hopefully they will come out with an update to change that, but right now it's just the remote, so it's hard to get the special features on dvd's like Charlie on the Chocolate factory to work properly.

Yes, it does. It doesn't open the tray, but the remote most certainly, 100% works the drive. I used it on King Kong to change menus and chapters.

Yup - does everything but eject.

Just placed my order on WalMart.com for it, and Batman Begins.

Hopefully the ones there come with King Kong and the remote.

Just ordered mine with Sleepy Hollow and Pitch Black. Can't wait to check it out.

Mine was delived a few days ago from Amzaon with the Kong disc thankfully. Wasnt sure If I made the prder deadline for getting the Kong disc. Anyways if you have a Harmony programable remote then you can control everything plus the eject. My Harmony 1000 worked great with it. Gotta love Harmony's. Dont know what I didwithout one of these in the past. I would literally be using like 8 different remotes plus I would have to purchase an XBox360 remote if I didnt have one. I absolutly recommend getting one for people that dont. You can get a mid level one like the 800 series for a little over a hunded bucks. Absolutly worth it.

Anyways I havent really played around with the Add-On yet besides seeing if my remote worked with it but I have heard wonderful things so far regarding picture quality and such. I have an A1 for my living room and got this for my bedroom. Looks like another quality product for HD-DVD :-)

PS..

So what is the best way to connect this, VGA or Component?

Well VGA is only way your going to be able to upconvert dvds on the drive, but I don't know some people say VGA looks washed out.

Circuit City is sold out in Austin. I wanted to use the coupon. Oh well.

Has anyone tried to hook their drive up to a PC yet? I've read that if you download the Toshiba drivers you can play movies from a PC. No 360 required.

It'll work as a CD/DVD player but as of now there is no HD-DVD playback software for PCs. Once that is available it should work fine.

Apparently this driver thdudf.inf will load the Toshiba drivers that will allow for HD-DVD playback. Although, you will need WinDVD 8 and a high powered PC for it to work. I was going to try, but then I thought....WHY? I have a XBOX 360

your gonna love it, HD-DVD rocks, Pitch Black looks great.


I would use Component on my pc monitor VGA looks good but the color isnt as vibrant, I was using it on a Dell 20 widescreen

My TV converts all signals to 720p. So I assume that if I hookup the HD-DVD player via component, I will see HD-DVDs at 720p and regular dvds at 480p, which my TV will convert to 720p anyway? Can someone let me know if this is accurate?

That would be correct.

Anyone get sleepy hollow DTS to work through the 360?

That was the first thing I was going to try out because I read that the 360 converts everything to DD+ regardless of which audio track you select in the movie. I should have mine before the week is over. I'll let you know if my receiver shows that it's playing back a DTS track or not.

The receiver will show it as a DD track regardless of which track you select. However, most people over at AVS are saying that if you select the true HD track there is a noticeable improvement in sound quality.

I was told the same thing by someone who has one also. I just don't understand why it won't output DTS. Seems like it's more work to convert it.

Not converting to DTS, and not being able to upconvert via component is why I will not be getting one.

But isnt it not possible (allowed) for ANY player to upconvert over component?

Well, it is a combination of not allowing upconversion over component, and MSFT deciding to not support HDMI at this time. Using VGA as its "digital" video connection is what irks me.