Before You Go Buy An HD DVD Player

You may want to read this. With Warner dumping HD-DVD in favor of Blu-ray, that will leave HD-DVD with only about 25% of the market. I'm pretty sure the remaining studios will follow suit.

Immediately after reading the article, I went searching Circuit City's web site for a Blu-ray player; I found a Sony BDP-S300 on sale for $299.99. I unhooked my Toshiba HD-A3, boxed it up, and headed to the store. They returned the HD-DVD player no problem (with an additional $100 for the price difference). As as a matter of fact, they even exchanged the HD-DVD version of Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix I had for the Blu-ray version free of charge. I won't be able to return The Bourne Ultimatum, but at least it has the regular DVD version on the other side of the disc.

The Blu-ray took a while to first start up, as was indicated in the manual. Lo and behold, I got a picture using the HDMI–DVI connection, something I never got with the Toshiba (mentioned in the blog entry noted above). I quickly set it to 1080i, and all is well.

Too bad I hadn't seen that artilce earlier, as I could have also returned the optical–coaxial adapter I bought (at a different store). This player has both optical and coaxial outputs, but since I can use this player to upscale regular DVDs (since the HDMI–DVI connection works), there is no need to have two players connected (also mentioned in previous blog entry—my receiver shares the optical and coaxial inputs labeled "DVD"). This player also has 5.1 channel outputs, so if I wanted "true" Dolby Digital Plus or uncompressed PCM 5.1, I could connect it to my receiver via the 5.1 analog inputs, but I would lose my back surround channel.

As an FYI, another reason to go with Blu-ray: Blockbuster only rents Blu-ray; no HD-DVD.