Best Buy is selling the Toshiba A30 for $399. Tell the Best Buy sales associate about the Circuit City price for $379 and they will honor that price. Additionally you will recieve 10 free HD DVDs with your purchase: 300 and The Bourne Identity are are included in the box; Best Buy will give you 3 HD DVDs of your choice (less than $34.99) from the store shelves; and Toshiba gives you 5 by mail-in rebate. It is a great deal to be sure.

The A30 is a great unit with HDMI resolutions up to 720p 1080p and 1080i and up-converts to 480p, 720p, 1080i and 1080p. We hooked up our unit to an Onkyo TX-SR505 Home theater receiver with HDMI switching with and HDMI cable for video and optical outs for audio. You are pretty much stuck with HDMI/optical connections as there are no multichannel analog outs. We use optical outs religously so we were not put off by this lack of analog outs. Why would you want to use analog component outs anyway? The only downside I can see is if you want to use multichannel analog outs for CD audio - but we have a nice CD player for that, right? The A30 supports a Dolby TrueHD so we think the lack of analog component outs is irrelevant.

The A30 performed well with a crisp picture even at 1080i. Importantly the A30 up-convertrs SD DVDs so this is a valid replacement for that 10 year old DVD player. When watching the SD DVD Madagascar the A30 registered at 480p but our TV indicated that it received a 1080p picture. Regardless the picture was stunning with a marked difference over a SD DVD player.

Performace on HD DVDs was fine as well. The remote is clunky and our universal Dish remote did not recognize any codes to control the A30. Although we did not test it with the top-of-the line Logitech harmony remotes, we are confident those universal remotes will operate this unit. Remember that these reviews are for the average customer. That said, the average customer may be stuck with an extra remote.

All in all, this is a solid unit and is a great entry level HD DVD player - I can see these Toshiba units around for a long time. In the setup menu there was a shaded option selection for “multiformat discs” this indicates to me that with a firmware update this player may be able to play the alternative BD format discs.

This is easily a recommended player for this format. With the upconvert this player could be on your shelf for years to come. With the HMDI and optical connections and upconvert I prefer this unit to the XBOX 360 HD DVD player.

click the link for tech specs

• Features: Backwards Compatibility; Persistent Storage; Web-Enabled Capability; CE-Link HDMI-CEC; OSD Language English/French/Spanish/Others; Advanced Navigation
• Playback Formats: HD DVD Video upto 1080p/24 Frames Per Second (24p)
• Support: DVD Video; DVD VR; DVD-R (Video); DVD-R DL (Video); DVD-RW (Video/VR CPRM); CD, CD-R/-RW;(CD-DA)
• Decoder: Dolby TrueHD; Dolby Digital Plus; DTS HD; Dolby Digital DTS
• Connections: Ethernet; HDMI with Deep Color; Digital / Analog out simultaneously; Component Output; Composite Output Analog (2 ch); Digital Optical Output
• Video: HD Output 720p/1080i/1080p; SD Upconversion 480p/720p/1080i/1080p
• Audio: High Bit Rate Audio (up to 7.1 channel) via HDMI

ILHDDVD Rating 4/5
Video/Image: 4/5 (slightly noticable ghosting keeps this from a 5/5)
Audio: 5/5 (TrueHD support and optical out, lack of multichannel analog out keeps the back of the unit clean)
recommended

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