(LATE UPDATE - 4/18/06 - 2:30 PM PDT)
Okay... a word of advice to all your folks out there who might have picked up HD-DVD players and software today. The audio levels on Warner's first two releases on the format, The Last Samurai and Phantom of the Opera, are mastered on the discs are a substantially lower level than the audio on Universal's Serenity. We're talking well below reference level, on all audio options. Why this was done by Warner is a mystery to us, but beware that if you start with one of the Warner discs and adjust your system volume to a normal listening level, and then switch to Serenity, you run the potential risk of damaging your speakers. More on this tomorrow.
(EARLY UPDATE - 4/18/06 - 12:30 PM PDT)
Well, here we are on the first day of class with HD-DVD... and Toshiba has announced that initial sales of their HD-A1 HD-DVD players are strong (click here and here for more on that). In fact, many stores carrying the hardware sold out this weekend. I drove over to a local Best Buy store here in Orange County this morning, and sure enough... there were a few diehards waiting to throw down their money at 10 AM.
As luck would have it, I managed to secure a loaner HD-A1 to use this week, while we wait for Toshiba to ship us official review hardware. I've also got three pieces of review software... Warner's The Last Samurai and The Phantom of the Opera, and Universal's Serenity (Warner's Million Dollar Baby is due later this week - it's apparently slightly delayed and is not in stores yet). What I'm going to do now is just give you some initial thoughts. Rest assured, I'll be posting more detailed reviews later this week.
First, the player. The construction of Toshiba's HD-A1 is fairly solid - not as good as my Pioneer Elite DV-59AVi DVD player, for example, but still better than most other entry level players. Setup is very easy and intuitive. I've had trouble with other DVD players in the past - I'm using HDMI to drive a native 1080 LCD video projector, and typically most upscaling DVD players need you to go into the setup menu to activate the HDMI output and upscaling. The HD-A1, however, recognized the HDMI connection right out of the box - there was no need to hook it up to a regular display via component cables and go into the menu screen to turn on the HDMI. The setup menus themselves are very simple and easy to use - very few settings, if any, needed to be changed in order to start viewing the discs.
The player does have a couple of big downsides right off the bat, however. The first is that the remote is absolutely awful. Just really a mess. It's basically the same as the one that's going to be included in the more expensive HD-XA1, except that it's not backlit. BIG mistake. The button labels are impossible to read in the dark, and few of the controls on the remote are intuitively laid out. At least on the cheaper unit, they could have labeled the remote in brighter paint or something. It's a disaster.
The other major downside is the time it takes the player to get into operating mode. When you first turn on the player itself, it takes a full minute to boot up into a usable configuration. You can't even open the disc tray during that time. Very irritating. Once it's ready to go, however, and you insert a disc, it takes about another 30 seconds to boot up the software. Again, very irritating. Still, it's worth noting that this is the kind of thing that's only going to get better as newer firmware becomes available, and as second and third generations of hardware hit the market.
Speaking of firmware, the player is designed so that you can connect it to the Net via a standard broadband LAN port, which will allow you to make fast and easy firmware upgrades to the hardware... and I suspect there's going to be a lot of them needed to add full interactivity and functionality.
In terms of backwards compatibility, the player seems to handle existing DVDs and CDs well. Its upconversion of standard definition DVD video is quite good, but still not quite as good as my Pioneer DV-59AVi, at least on first impression. I haven't really had the time to test and compare this in any kind of depth, however, so don't take that as gospel. I'll let you know more when I do.
Now for the software. Universal's Serenity is basically a port of the existing DVD release, simply with the film in high-definition video and Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio. No offense to Joss Whedon fans, but I do sorely wish the first title I'd watched on HD-DVD was something other than this film. Still, the picture quality is absolutely spectacular - vibrant color, fantastic contrast and VERY few compression or processing artifacts (and if you watch a lot of broadcast HD video, you've no doubt seen a lot of those). It's just utterly clean and clear without being too crisp or edgy - a very natural looking and extremely pleasing image. I knew it was going to be impressive, but I'm still surprised at the sheer improvement over regular DVD, at least when viewed in a very large projection format. You notice so much more of the characteristics of the actual film medium rather than any kind of video aspects, which is as it should be. Warner's The Last Samurai is equally impressive in terms of video, though I haven't watched Phantom of the Opera yet (again, not a title I would have chosen to release first on HD-DVD, but what the hell).
The Dolby Digital Plus audio quality on these discs is also stellar, though again I have yet to Phantom of the Opera (which has Dolby TrueHD). The Plus audio is lovely - easily on par with the best DTS tracks I've listened to. In terms of the overall audio quality and experience, you wonder just how much better Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD could possibly sound... and how most people are going to possibly be able to appreciate the difference. I'll have more on this tomorrow, after I've had the time to check out the 2.0 TrueHD the Tosh player will allow on Phantom.
It's worth noting that, like current DVD discs, Serenity has a film-themed root menu. Hitting the 'menu' button on your remote takes you back out to that root menu where you can access all the features and options. Warner's discs, however, do NOT have any kind of root menu. When you start playing them, they simply go right into the movie. Hitting the 'menu' button brings up a menu overlay while the movie continues to play, from which you can select all of the various features via pop-up/sliding menus. It's very similar to how the start/program bar works in Windows XP, except that the look of the bar is themed to the film itself. I do, however, wish the discs had a main menu. Maybe it's just that I've gotten used to the way standard DVD works, but not to be able to pop out to a main menu seems... wrong somehow. Some combination of the way Universal's menus work, and the new menu overlay, would seem to be optimal. The extras I've seen so far are all in standard definition (and they're not anamorphic widescreen either), but I've only really dug through Serenity so far. I will tell you, however, that it's jarring to see the difference in quality going from well-compressed HD video to less well-compressed standard definition video.
One other irritating thing I've discovered about the hardware when playing the discs, is that when you change audio tracks on the fly, there's no on-screen graphic that notes what language you're changing to. So you can't tell what language you're in until someone starts speaking. The 'display' button does bring up a nice read-out of the audio format you're listening to, and what the particular codec and resolution of the video is, but there's still no language indication.
I should also tell you that Warner's discs boot into a little promo video for the format, that explains how the discs work (how to use the menu overlay, etc). Thankfully, you can skip past it. Warner's discs also include a promotional flyer touting some 50 titles that are coming for Summer 2006 to the format from the studio, including The Matrix, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Full Metal Jacket, The Perfect Storm, The Shawshank Redemption, Batman Begins, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Troy and The Dukes of Hazzard: Unrated.
Anyway, those are just my initial impressions. Overall, I would say that this is a pretty solid start for HD-DVD. I've experienced nothing so far that would, in theory, cause me to warn early adopters away from the format (other than what I've already said recently about the wisdom of waiting given the format war). And it's worth noting that even those things that I think are a little rough, less than fully functional and perhaps non-optimal about my HD-DVD experience so far, are all the same kinds of things I experienced in the very first DVD players and software way back in March of 1997. The picture and sound quality, as it stands, now is excellent and it's only going to get better. Of course, I expected no less from the HD-DVD launch... and I expect no less from Blu-ray Disc when it arrives in May/June.
I'm going to take the rest of the day to really soak all this in and try to process my thoughts more, so I'll have more to say about it tomorrow. I'll work on getting full reviews of the software posted over the next couple of days as well.
Stay tuned...
Bill Hunt, Editor
The Digital Bits
billhunt@thedigitalbits.com |
