Toshiba HD-EP30 - HD DVD Player - With 1080P Full HD3 - Plus 2 Free HD DVD's

This player is excellent. Connected by HDMI at 1080p24 to a Full-HD plasma screen, the picture quality is limited essentially by what came out of the camera. I can't fault it, and as a trained broadcast engineer I'm exceedingly fussy. The scaler does a good job of standard-definition DVDs too (Region 2 only).

The internet connection was easy to set up - turn on DHCP and DNS, plug it into the router, and that's it. I only did this out of curiosity - I don't expect ever to use it, although I did use it to flash the firmware to the latest version. This went without a hitch but took about 45 minutes.

There is just a little fan noise, but it's only perceptible in a very quiet room and is completely masked once the audio starts.

There were two discs in the box - 300 and The Bourne Supremacy. Five additional free discs can be obtained by downloading and filling in a form.

I was intially very sceptical about the merits of High definition DVD, both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Could it really provide noticeably better picture quality than what I was already viewing, with a Denon 1920 upscaling DVD player ? The Denon provides a great picture on my set-up, which includes a Panasonic AE900 projector projecting onto a screen just under seven feet wide. I was watching the prices of these high def players with interest, and when the price of the Toshiba HD-EP30 dropped to below £200 with seven free films thrown in, I decided that now was the time to find out.

The Toshiba HD-DVD player comes with an HDMI cable included. Setting the player up was a matter of a few seconds, plug in the power lead, optical output to the amplifier (you will need to buy an optical lead if you want the best audio quality, unless your amp can process both audio and video through HDMI), HDMI lead to the projector, and switch on. The player takes about a minute to power up, not really a problem for me as the projector also takes a good few seconds to power on and reach full lamp brightness. The player takes a further few seconds to recognise an HD-DVD or SD-DVD disc, then the HD-DVD logo appears and you're in.

My projector being native 720p resolution, I didn't even bother with the higher 1080p resolution setting. At 720p, the picture quality is astounding. HD-DVD came out razor sharp and the colours literally burst onto the screen. There is a very clear and noticeable difference between HD-DVD and standard definition (SD) DVD.

The sound quality is also extremely good. HD-DVD sound via optical is transferred at a higher bitrate than SD-DVD, but still compressed. For Dolby True-HD you will need an amplifier capable of taking sound via HDMI. Me, I don't think I would be able to tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed audio - I think it would depend on how expensive your speakers and amplifier are. I can say though, that the sound quality from an HD-DVD was noticeably better than the sound from an SD-DVD.

I tried a few SD-DVD's to assess the upscaling capabilities of the Toshiba compared to the Denon. The Denon 1920 uses a Faroudja processor for upscaling and I've always been extremely happy with the quality. The Toshiba uses an Anchor Bay processor for upscaling. Maybe it's the fact that the Denon is a couple of years out of date, but the Toshiba was noticeably better at upscaling DVD's than the Denon. Within a few hours of testing, I knew that I would never watch another film on the Denon again, unless it was region 1 (the Toshiba can play HD-DVD's from any country as HD-DVD is a region free format, but it will only play region 2 DVD's).

Although it's reportedly very easy to upgrade to the latest firmware via the ethernet link, I didn't bother. Every disc I tried played fine. I decided that if I came across a problem or a particular reason to do so at any stage, I would upgrade the firmware, but if not....

In summary, this is a fantastic HD-DVD player, and a superb DVD upscaler as well. An upscaled DVD will never match the quality of an HD-DVD, at least not on a large screen, but on a smaller screen I guess the player is worth the money for the upscaling capabilities alone. For HD-DVD, if you have £200 and want stunning picture quality and sound, you can't go wrong. I can't help thinking, if 720p quality is this good, what will the full 1080p resolution be like ? If you own a TV capable of 1080p resolution you're in a better position than me to find out !

This player really is superb, great picture, great sound, very good value for money, the player itself looks really sleek, slim with a glossy black look to the front and a silver strip across the front.
The only thing i could say negative is that when playing a hd dvd at 1080p it seems like it has (for want of a better expression), a slight lack of processing power, being very fickle I notice the tinyest imperfections, the scrolling movement can sometimes seem a little bit jerky, but its not enough to spoil veiwing at all (normal, upscaled, dvd's play flawless and look amazing), this might improve with future firmware updates.

Also it came really fast, ordered 11pm on 13th dec, arrived in the morning on saturday 15th dec, spot on service from amazon.