that they offer no desktop readers or burners

Whats the purpose??? No 1080P???

So comparing apples to apples (features to features) it's really $399 HD-DVD to $450 Blu-Ray . . . not 50% at all.

Basically, there's still a $100 difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players. Not much to someone who's going to invest thousands in home theater and movie titles.

I work for a retailer who sells HD-TVs and more regular people than you think, ask for 1080P or full HD. They want the best they can get. Cause they are tired of the upgrade game. Those are the people that are buying right now. So I see no difference in the format war from last week. Toshiba is just blowing out the 1080i stuff to get rid of it.

I still think HD-DVD is losing this battle faster than I originally thought. Just maybe the public is buying based on Sony's reputation for making good stuff.

ed- the xbox hd-dvd unit works fine on a desktop, you just need to find the right drivers.

There is not one single reason in the entire world that anyone should base a decision regarding a high-definition player or high-definition TV around 1080p. 1080p is a farce - a pure marketing ploy that is completely meaningless.

Let's look at the facts. The best content you can get on a Blu-Ray or an HD-DVD is a 24 fps film in 1080 lines of resolution. The film was shot progressive by nature, and that's the way it's stored on the DVD.

When a 1080p HDDVD/BR player plays this back, it sends a 1080p 24fps signal to the display device, which displays it that way.

When a 1080i HDDVD/BR player plays this back, it sends a 1080i 30 frames/60 fields per second signal to the display device. To get 30 frames/60 fields per second out of 24 fps, the DVD player performs a telecine process, where 10 fields are created out of 4 film frames. A normal, old school TV would display this exact signal, resulting in an interlaced, juddery display.

Any decent high-definition TV from today will post-process this 1080i signal, and perform an inverse telecine on it. The original film frames will be recovered electronically, and the display will display a 1080p 24 fps signal. This is the exact same display you'll get from the 1080p player.

There is NO content available that has a true 1080p 60 frames-per-second signal. None. Nada. Zilch. There is not one legitimate use in the entire world for a 1080p DVD player until such content becomes available.

And why is Toshiba make a 1080P player then. I'm not leaving it up to the TV put the picture back together correctly. Look at the way the TVs convert regular DVD or SDTV and display it on the screen. Terribly! So I don't trust the TV to do a good job. But just to display the information bit for bit as it's supposed to. 1080P coming of the disc directly to each pixel on the screen. Unprocessed.

I don't blame you for not trusting the TV to do it correctly. There's many TVs out there on the market that do a lot of things incorrectly, not just inverse telecine. (Many screw up aspect ratio, most over-saturate color, a few even have the interlaced chroma bug).

But there are some that do things pretty well. The Sony XBR/SXRD rear-projection sets will properly do inverse telecine (Sony calls it "CineMotion® Reverse 3:2 Pulldown Technology"). This doesn't harm picture quality at all. This is not a compression or resizing process, it's simply a re-ordering of scan lines back to the frame that they were originally supposed to go it. No information is lost, it's simple buffering.

Upconversion of SDTV to HDTV looks terrible on any set - this is a resize process, and there just isn't enough information in the SDTV signal to look good when it's upconverted.

You lose far more picture quality in the MPEG-2/MPEG-4/WMV compression that is on the HDDVD/BR disc than you lose anywhere else, anyway.

Any by the way, if you think that if you have a 1080p DVD player and a 1080p TV and you believe that what you're watching is unprocessed, I have news for you. It's all processed. Every TV on the market messes with the signal in a lot of ways - color enhancement, edge/detail enhancement, dynamic range increase, resize/aspect, geometry adjustments to compensate for the nonlinearities in the TV, etc. You're not going to be watching the native signal on anything that's available in the store.

Any no, I probably won't buy the Toshiba $299 player. I'm waiting for an affordable dual-format player because as I see it, both Blue-Ray and HD-DVD will coexist in the marketplace for the forseeable future.

buying cheap 1080i player makes perfect sense

i got the Sony XBR/SXRD, I'm going for $300 now,
digit-- and spend the $500 for dual when they get erdone. LG for $1195 dual is a little price--ey
HD sets you free Dg

"Upconversion of SDTV to HDTV looks terrible on any set - this is a resize process, and there just isn't enough information in the SDTV signal to look good when it's upconverted."

I've seen great looking SD picture from older Sony XBR large 36-42" picture tube sets. And I've seen good upconversion by networks that actually loook very nice in HD.

I don't believe its's lack of information. I think the problem is lousy scaling process that happens on the digital board in the set.

There needs to be TV's that are incapable of doing anything but displaying the pixels directly to the screen without any processing. I'm tired of seeing 25 logos on every piece of equipment of supposed proprietary processes that improve the picture.

I'm not the only one who would like to see this. Some of the well known reviewers would like to see it too.

Either way, I think hd-dvd is losing it (according to recent news)

Anyways, for me, I'm more interested in their capacities because i'm a heavy computer user. Therefore, bluray is the choice for me. Just think how you can backup a 200GB harddrive with only 8 disks (single layer) @ $18 each vs 14 @ $12 each
$144 (Bluray) vs $168 (HDDVD), this is current price btw. Now which one is cheaper? And believe me, in the end, they both will drop to about the same prices no matter who wins.

I am not so familiar with the exact situation but from facts and specifications I read from other sources:

DVDs are encoded in 30 FPS (60 FPS interlaced) in NTSC and 25 FPS (50 FPS interlaced) in PAL. Because of the analog standards and the NTSC/PAL systems, they have no choice.

Blu-Ray can choose between 24/30/60 FPS, both progressive and interlaced in encoding. The players are required to decode and produce the correct output format.

HD DVD is the same though I am not sure 24 FPS is supported or not.

As the latest PS3 system update, it can output 24 FPS progressive output. So, if the disc is using 24 FPS (some from SonyPictures) and the HDTV with HDMI is supporting 24 FPS, you will get the best video quality.

"$144 (Bluray) vs $168 (HDDVD), this is current price btw"

It's a lot cheaper and more convenient to just buy another hard drive.

I've seen 1080p blue-ray player mated with 1080p (50 inch plasma) display. You have to be sitting pretty close to the display to notice a difference in a comparable 1080i display. If you like sitting in the first row of the movie theatre, go with the 1080p. I'll save my $.

SomeJoe7777 - you missed one important feature of 1080p TVs over 1080i ones: sure, it may be very difficult to tell a difference in video quality. But if you want to hook up a computer to your tv, definitely go 1080p. All 1080p tvs are "truly" 1080 lines of resolution; all 1080i tvs I've looked at have fewer lines of resolution (usually 720). I don't know how or why this is, but this is what i've seen.

I have owned an upconverting Progressive Scan 1080i DVD Player now for over a year. Why would anyone ever want to buy this when current players can upscale to those formats. You can buy it right now for like $120. Secondly, does it state anything about Component allowing upscaling? or is it just HDMI/DVI?

You're quite correct, for a computer monitor, a 1080p TV can make a difference (because the computer can produce 1080p 60 fps output). However, I wasn't discussing the need for the 1080p TV, I was pointing out the uselessness of the 1080p HDDVD/BR player.

Many HDTVs don't display the full 1080 (i or p) resolution because of inherent limitations in their display technology, even though all HDTVs will accept the 1080i signal. DLP HDTVs are famous for this - virtually all of them do not actually display 1080 lines, but only 720. You have to look closely at the technical specifications for your TV to find out exactly what it really will display.

I have a 7-year-old Toshiba rear-projection CRT HDTV (no DVI or HDMI, only component). But it displays the full 1080 lines of resolution when fed a 1080i signal. Even better, when fed an SDTV signal (480i), it actually scans 480i lines like a regular TV (no upscaling to 1080i at all). This gives the SDTV signal a better look than when it's upscaled for display on a 1080i-only display device, like a modern LCD.