I'd been eagerly looking forward to the arrival of a Blu-ray Disc player at Sound & Vision since - well, ever since the rival HD DVD format launched last April. But our first round of Blu-ray movie watching ended with executive editor Rob Sabin and I walking away disappointed and confused.
The Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray Disc player had been out just a couple of days when my phone began ringing with some interesting reports from the field. It didn't take long to realize that this would be no ordinary product launch.
If you've read our review of the Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray Disc player - the world's first - you know what we thought of the picture and sound quality with the first batch of Blu-ray discs. But there's a lot more to this box than what comes out of it. Here's a run-down on some key features and few details you should know about hooking it up.
Here are the three most important things you should know about Toshiba's much anticipated HD-XA1, the world's very first high-definition optical disc player: 1. It's not just a DVD player - it's a computer.
Setting up the Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player for the best picture and sound quality is not for the uninitiated. Even home theater experts will face a learning curve to understand the different ways to extract video and audio from the player and the ramifications of each option and will have to read the manual to find what settings in the player's internal menu will yield the desired results.
As soon as you pull it from the carton, you know that the Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player means business. Its 17-inch rack-size width and 20 pounds of heft beckon to a day when men were men and DVD players were both taller and heavier than a slice of white bread.
Like swimmers in some Darwinian gene pool, DVD recorders are quickly mutating to fill every possible niche. Yet as they evolve, you can count on finding a core set of features in most decks - a TV tuner, a VCR-style timer, and a handful of recording "modes" that let you trade picture quality for playback time.
The first DVD recorder we ever reviewed, back in December 2000, was a Pioneer, and the company has followed that by a series of ever more versatile and easy-to-use models.
Last time I checked, there were five different recordable-DVD disc types - a potential compatibility catastrophe. Wouldn't it be great if someone invented a player that could play all kinds of DVDs? Even better, what if it was also a recorder?
The latest DVD recorders have so many advanced features that they can be daunting to use. Just pick up the instruction manual, and you'll likely find yourself slogging through pages of editing commands as well as countless rules for recording on different disc formats.