Home > Consumer Reviews > Toshiba HD-XA2 1080p HD-DVD Player

Regardless of the outcome of the ongoing format war, I'm glad I got this player. If you own more than 100 Standard DVD's the HD-XA2 will prove to be a wise investment just for it's upconverting quality. After watching several of my "old" DVD's any temptation to double dip by buying the HD version of a movie has disappeared. It would be a waste of money. The only movies I see myself buying again are the LOTR trilogy and the Matrix trilogy. The HD DVD picture quality on my 1080p TV is stunning and unkind to many actors and actresses ... Laurence Fishburne's face in MI3 looks like it had a Dick Chaney facial ... never seen so many holes in my life. I'm sure that HD movies are going to raise the stock of make-up artists and plastic surgeons in Hollywood.

The Hardware itself is beautiful... elegant design and solid. They say you can feel quality and as soon as you take it out of the box you can feel the quality build of the HD-XA2 in your hands. These days consumer electronics are 90% plastic and 10% metal. The HD-XA2 is the other way around. The remote control is a trowback to the 1970's. I had not seen a metal remote for 30 years and it looks like a 30 year old design, just a rectangular box. However it has an elegant simplicity that grows on you.

The price of this player has gone down considerably recently and even though it's still expensive when compared with standard DVD players I believe it's worth the price. Many times I have bought an expensive product and felt cheated afterwards. With the HD-XA2 I feel I got my money's worth, even a bit of a bargain. I highly recommend it.

I'm not a complainer and my patience is usually long lived, but I have to admit it was beginning to run a little short with this player. I don't feel I have a defective unit at all and it plays just fine. There are numerous reviews here giving all it's good points and bad, so I won't get into that. My experience with Toshiba's customer support has been rather helpful with little waiting for answers.
I began having the problems others have stated about the unit freezing up at various times, but ONLY with HD DVDs. Not one single incident with Standard DVDs. Heat isn't an issue because it would happen when just turned on or running for a couple of hours and anywhere in between. Brand new disc or not, it didn't matter and there was absolutely no pattern to it's sudden stopping and powering itself off. And yes, you have to turn it back on, reboot, find where you left off, and try to explain once more to your wife why you spent several hundred dollars for this "top of the line" player.
Keep reading, I'm getting there...
I've tried several times to connect to the player to the internet and was able to do so only once for one firmware upgrade. It would never connect again. I've tried to download the file from Toshiba's customer support to do the latest upgrade several times and finally succeeded. I can only assume they are busy. Now here's where some helpful info might help some of you. When you donwload the file, understand that you cannot see the file. Your computer won't show anything other than the size of it. It's an ISO file and has to be burned to a CD from your computer. Trouble is, not any program will do this. I tried several Freeware programs that are suppose to handle ISO files, but none did. Even the one CNET recommended. I had to upgrade my NERO software and I was finally, finally able to upgrade the firmware to 2.5 and as of now, it seems... (long pause...) it seems to be doing just fine. It has not frozen up and powered down like in the past. Maybe the bugs inherent with HDDVDs and some players finally got worked out with this update.
I'm not writing all this to discourage you from buying this unit. It's a good unit and the quality of the video images are really very good. I sort of knew what I might be getting into with this player and don't regret it as of now, and hope that doesn't change.
BUT, if you are having some of the same problems, they can be dealt with. I have a burned CD with the 2.5 firmware update on it and I am more that willing to share it with any who need help. Toshiba told me that they will have the disc available "soon", so interpret that with a grain of salt.
Bottom line is that I think it's a very good player with some issues that can be overcome. I would think that by now the newer units already have the latest firmware updates. You can find out what you have by hitting the "setup" button on the remote. On the menus, select "General", then "Maintenance", then "Update" and you'll see what version you have. (I would have given this unit a five star rating no questions asked if not for the firmware issues.)

Good luck with your new toy!!! I'm a happy camper now!!!

The player arrived with firmare 1.5, which is the very latest out.

Now first of all for shoppers out there looking for their first new high definition format player let me warn you. There are two COMPETING formats. The Toshibsa HD-DVD format, which this player is and SONY BLURAY with is another format. Both have studios backing them, and both have content the other does not have at this time, meaning some movies are only out in 1 format. Many movies are out on both formats. Toshiba was the innovator that came out with the very first dvd players back around 1995 or whenever so they have a good history in this technology.

I have both format players. But people who have an agenda to push one format or the other tend to post extremely negative reviews of competing products to scare people.
So I would take any extreme reviews trashing a player in EITHER format, with a grain of salt in this arena.

SO now on to the HD-Xa2. I have played it for about 50 hours and have not had one freeze, hiccup, or any other problem in the sound or video. I have played both HD-DVD discs and regular dvds in this player.

THe video is simply superb for HD-DVDs, stunning on high def displays. Movies have been remastered for the higher resolution and they all look much better. Think of Miami CSI in high def broadcast on a 1080i set and now think of getting that whenever you pop in a an HD-DVD version of a movie and you get some idea.

I have seen posts about bugs in this player, to date I personally have not found one and I am fairly savvy technically.

The hidden gem part of this player is it has a hollywood technology class chip upscaler in it for REGULAR dvds, and can make your regular dvds (referred to as sd-dvd, for standard defintion by many) look like new discs as you can see more detail than before if you have a 1080i or 1080p display, and to a lesser extent 720p. Of course without a display that does these resolutions you can not use this player to play the HD-DVD movies in their intended resolutions or anywhere near those resolutions ( 720p, 1080i, and 1080p.

Several major gurus have reviewed the upscaled image quality of this player of how it processes regular dvds and say its superior to a [...]-[...]$ video processor scaler that consumers often get for regular dvds.The scaler is not necessary when playing HD-DVD movies as they are already mastered in a higher format so they do not need to be upscaled.

For the money, simply put, this player does a superb job with both HD-DVD movies and your existing dvd movies.

It is very solidly built with a brushed metal chasis and metal remote. I give it 4 stars. I am not giving it 5 stars because I do see SOME people complaining about bugs and also because I have only had the player 2-3 days and want to write an honest review.

This IS THE HD-DVD player to get. I had a Toshiba HD-A1, the very first HD-dvd player Toshiba put out, I again had no problems with it but this player outputs just as good an image and upscales regular dvd's better than my [...]$ Pioneer Elite 59avi player that outputs 480i to my Pioneer Plasma and lets the panel do the scaling. That is really saying something about the scaling performance of this player.

There is a Toshiba rebate offering 5 HD-DVD movies with the purchase of this player, that makes it sell for fair amount less than HALF the cost of the current bluray players when you factor in the movies. So one fiscal advantage of this format is it is also at this moment by far a better value. They have a fairly large number of movies to choose from.

I own a bluray player as well, and to date have not seen Sony backing any 5 movie rebate giveaways though I have heard of 1 or 2 free movies being in a bluray player box to be fair. I find the bluray movies to look at times almost as good but not have the 3d pop I see in the HD-DVD format. I also had to return my first Samsung bluray as it had a horrible noise bug in the chips that ruined all the movies with some kind of fuzzy onscreen video noise. So again, both formats have their growing pains, but do not let a post that seems to be extremely negative of either format stop you, these players do work and work well.

OK, here goes. First of all I bought a Playstation 3 just to play Blu-ray disc not games. I read a lot of reviews etc and felt that this would be the way to go. However I think that the marketing for the Blu-ray has been a little unfair in the fact when I looked at both formats it seemed that Blu-ray had the push for in-store displays and the so called informed sales staff all were pushing Blu-ray. Well I then decided to purchase an LG combo player but decided against it because it was not full spec for the formats. Recently I decided to buy another Blu-ray player that was meant for just playing Blu-ray because I don't like the fact that the PS3 has no screen on the front of it when loading disc. When I started reading reviews of the second generation of HD and Blu-ray machines the Toshiba HD-XA2 player kept showing up as a first rate maching. I already have started building a Blu-ray dvd library and wasn't even going to consider an HD DVD format player. Well I decided what the heck Ill get a stand along player for each format because it ends up being close to the same amount of the LG combo of $1,200 Well when I hooked up the Toshiba HD-XA2 WHAT A SURPRISE! This machine ROCKS!. The picture is unbelievable and the sound both of which was better than my Blu-ray PS3. The most awesome part of this unit is the quality of the up-conversion of standard DVD's its incrediable. This is one of the finest machines I have ever owned up to this point. I am so very satisfied. Now I will wait for the next geration Blu-ray machines to match this quality before I will purchase.

This HD DVD Player is every bit as good as it sounds. It displays a beautiful picture in full 1080p (if your HD TV supports). The fact that it upconverts to 1080p is, I think, it's strongest selling point. I just purchased this the week of March 12th 2007 for $640 including the 5 free HD DVD's rebate offer. Just 2 weeks later this unit is available for just under $600 with the same rebate offer (which lasts until the end of July). So, if you don't desire this player ASAP...I would consider holding out another few weeks. It's probably going down in price a bit more. P.S.: I am not on Wall Street and I didn't just stay at A Holiday Inn Express. If you wait or not, the money I paid for it is worth it.