Toshiba HD-EP30 - £179
http://www.av-sales.co.uk/proddetail.php?prod=TOSHIBA-HD-EP30
Toshiba HD-EP30 - £179
Venturer's anticipated cut-price SHD7001 HD DVD player went on sale this morning on the QVC home shopping channel for less than was expected. At £162.62 (or two easy payments of £84.96), it's the cheapest standalone HD DVD player on the market. First announced at IFA, we covered the SHD7001 back in September. Then in November …
Black friday sales in the US and they were knocking out toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD players at $99 and we are supposed to feel glad! If HD DVD want to win then knock the players out at £100 and the films at £1-2 more then DVD. The big thing about HD DVD was that making them was supposed to be cheaper then Bluray and yet they are both rrp'ing at £20+
It seems that neither side is willing to relaly go for the jugular to win this "battle"
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bundle crap films with a crap brand...
great way to promote NEXT GEN technology. In a way it's sad to see the
obviously struggling hddvd format plummet to such depths of misery.
perhaps the next ploy will add the jackass trilogy(coming soon..), 15 of the worst-movies-you-would-never-admit-you-owned; and a free 50" TOSHIBA hd tv..
and if you really push the salesperson they'll even throw in the hdmi lead.. and Paris, since she's lost most of inheritance boo hoo
"right, who's going to confess to actually watching a teleshopping channel. Come on, I wanna see some hands!!!"
I watch them, they're great entertainment at times.Far better than the reality TV progs where you watch manipulated highlights of people doing nothing. Some good stuff on there as well and yes I am a happy customer of QVC.
"It also comes with an HDMI cable, though the player provides component-video and composite-video outputs too. There's a 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port on the back for linking HD DVDs to online content, and both digital optical and analogue audio outputs."
I thought that the HDMI spec was designed to provide a protected path for the purposes of DRM ? What's that ? No DRM on HD-DVD ? Go ahead, plug in that ethernet cable - do ya feel lucky, punk ?
And besides that, more of the available HD content is available on Blu-Ray.
Not that I'm interested in "content" anyway. But for my purposes (PC backup etc) Blu-Ray is the only choice. As noted by Sampler, LG already do a BR writer, which allows HD-DVD playback, BR DL writing, BR rewriting, and DVD/cd writing and rewriting. So for my purposes 50GB on a disc is pretty good. Not to mention that I am unable to find an HD-DVD writer for the PC that I can actually buy, even if I were to accept the 20GB loss of storage per disc, and the fact that there seems to be no rewritable disc version.
And some shills claim HD-DVD is better - lol
BTW Amazon have 839 HD-DVD titles and 1055 Bluray titles available to buy.
And another BTW, vhs won over Beta, because of the recording length available.
There's still a lot of CRT TVs out there. Only when CRTs are extinct and everyone is HD compatible will the formats take off big time.
The quality of DVD was noticable even on CRTs, but you need a HD LCD, Plasma etc to make HD DVD or Blu-ray worth it. Not just any old LCD or Plasma, one with a 24Hz mode or slow panned shots won't be very smooth.
one point I'd argue with is the recording length. I don't know about you, but since the days of high speed connections and multiple PCs in my home(s), I wouldn't for my life use and wait for optical media for backups - how long to burn 50 gigs? And what about when you're not at home but work remotely on your box? How do you insert and replace the DVDs?
I backup across PCs, in a set once, and then forget about it way. Cannot forget, cannot "shit I've got to get disks" cannot "damn it won't fit", etc. It's hot.
I beg to differ on the reason vhs won over beta.
If everyone remembers correctly, VHS tapes were cheaper, and a certain entertainment industry thrived very quickly making cheap straight to video (with a lot of pink colours) films.
as for the format wars. am I REALLY that bothered about buying all my films again.
do I REALLY need all that much more detail? Will I even notice it while sat drunk watching Rush Hour? :)
some things will obviously be great in HD, but there is no rush, and thats probably why the takeup is nowhere near as fast as with dvd's.
Dvd's offered more durable storage than video cassettes, took up less space and of course the quality is great.
I do like the idea of writing tons of data onto one disc, especially since a lot of my backups on cd are now unreadable (even on discs that were supposed to last 100 years, which I think would work if I had some nice vacuum storage for them) so I need somewhere easy to transfer all my old files to.
I don't see a few overpriced boxes on QVC making much of a difference. Besides, the thing is $199 in the US, so how is £170 a bargain? On top of that there are large numbers of blu ray players appearing from brand name manufacturers in the next 12 months that ensure that prices will probably be far less than £170 this time next year.
HD DVD has a serious problem in Europe. A trip to HMV will show that Blu Ray commands anywhere 3 to 10 times the space as HD DVD. Both are still in their infancy, but it looks to me as if Blu is the stronger of the two. The problem for adoption of both formats is that prices for media borders on rape. I know of few films that justify forking out upwards of £20 (sometimes £30) to watch them in high definition when often the same movie on DVD is often a third the price, especially after its been out a while. While the rape continues, neither format is going to pick up.
Let's just hope the price of movies drops. Otherwise the "winner" of this war might be the proud owner of a severely diminished market as consumers revolt against ripoff prices.
Nope, your not the only one!!!
Well, thats a lie, there is a difference, but there isnt a huge difference and certainly not enough to justify a move. There were clear differences when dvd came out compared to vhs/beta and thats why it took off so well, here we have something that the industry is TELLING us is much more superior when in actual fact the difference isn't actually living up to the hype.
I am a sad adopter, I bought into the whole skyhd rubbish and have watched a few "hd" films on pc and tv and I can honestly say, hand on heart, it isn't worth it.
Sure if the prices of disks fall to that of dvds (and the players) then why not, but at this moment in time I feel that consumers arent really that bothered, and quite right too.
I third (or whateverth by now) that lot. DVD had the advantage of being a ton better than VCR for a nominal cost. HD offers an incremental improvement at massive cost (new telly, new player and unknown "FUD factor" in HDCP).
BTW, VHS won 'cos Sony licensed Beta tech while JVC stuck VHS in the public domain. Nobody likes paying one of their major competitors for the privilege of building a competing product. Anyhow, the result was that Beta players remained expensive objects from a select few manufacturers while VHS costs plummeted in a hail of cheap copies to a level that the mass market was prepared to pay. As usual, it took the content providers so long to wake up and smell the coffee that for a while it was possible to buy a new VCR for less than the cost of a recent-release film to play on it.
The new formats look very impressive for the Americans who suffer with TV picture quality no better than the UK had in the 1960's; but the basic HD picture is only slightly better than UK broadcast TV (100 lines extra)
1080 IS a visible improvement, but not so big as to be worth upgrading; if my TV blew up tomorrow I MIGHT go 1080p, but not before.
TBH, having watched broadcast TV on a hideously expensive Panasonic Plasma and comparing it to my last-of-the-line Panasonic 32" CRT, my CRT wins hands down!!
DVDs etc look no better on the plasma than on my CRT either, and freeview looks hideous on the plasma.
Weird - no-one seems to have a problem moving to lower quality LCD/Plasma from the higher quality CRT. If you can take that much of a quality hit and be a happy viewer then the difference between standard DVD and BR/HD is not even going to be discernible unless your TV is very low quality.
As for disc capacity - who cares - there are far better back-up and archive options available - anyone writing that amount of data to an optical drive really needs to think about their plan again.