Well, I decided that prices had fallen far enough to take the HD plunge. This is no small matter because of the format war. So.......... I bought a player for both formats. The Samsung BD-P1200 and the Toshiba HD-XA2. I did not buy them new so I did save myself some money. They both put out a beautiful standard definition picture via regular DVDs. They also put out a gorgeous video picture. But, I just watched the Bourne Ultimatum (HD-DVD) last night, and to be honest, I could not tell that this was an HD picture for 99% of the movie. The other 1%, I really had to struggle to tell the difference. Now, in all fairness, the Planet Earth (HD-DVD) vidoes looked better than what I could get via DishNetwork HD and this series are truly remarkable but one would expect great quality using the latest HD video cameras. On the other hand, film was not much better than SD DVD's.
What makes the investment even more questionable is all the hassles I am going through to find an HDMI switch that will work with all of my components. The first switch I bought failed miserably. I have another on its way from Impact Acoustics but I am not holding my breath. So now I have all the new components sitting on top of my AV credenza (the other half is not too tickeled about this with guests coming for the holidays) so I can access the rear panels to switch out HDMI cables for the different players.
Another real pain is that my first disc I acquired through NetFlix was Pirates of the Caribian: At Worlds End. Well, it got all the way through the preliminary trailers and halted at the talking skull. And, that is as far as it got. It seems I am not the only one with this problem, even with the latest firmware update. Again, in all fairness, the Cars trailer was VERY impressive. It looked like you could pull the car right off the screen. But, this should be expected from a high resolution digital source. Blu-Ray also provided a spectacular standard DVD picture. Lord of the Rings looked really good.
But, once again, my Denon also produced a great standard DVD picture. So much so that I would challenge most people to tell me which DVD was which through the three players on the same source material I have seen so far that is HD.
Lastly, I noticed a big difference in audio quality on concert DVDs between Dolby Digital and Pro Logic II, with the latter, in most cases sounding better. I have read that the drop in LFE is to be expected, but what a pain to have to adjust for every movie and every source. This was not experienced on film based material or on the Planet Earth discs.
I am renting all of my HD material because I see no reason to buy it just to have obsolete material laying around years from now, should one or the other go away. I can justify the hardware purchase because both have awesome SD video processing via Silicon Optix Reon chips.
Maybe I am not giving the formats enough time to see more examples of HD film material but so far, I am really wondering if all the money, time, and continuous troubles is really worth the marginal improvement I see so far. Are Denon's that good or are the quality of transfers really that marginal on HD films?
Does anyone feel the same as I do?
