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>>Hi, I'm Matthew Maskovciak, Assistant Editor at CNET and this is the Toshiba HDA2. This is Toshiba's budget player and it's actually the least expensive high def disk player currently on the market. As you can see from the design, it's a lot smaller than it's predecessor the HDA1. There's almost an inch and a half less tall. The rest of the design is pretty simple. The only thing is you've got a flip down panel here and there is a firewire jack as well as some extension ports which Toshiba hasn't announced what they're actually for yet. In the back you can check out the connectivity. It's pretty basic for a high def disk player. What it's missing is there's no multi-channel analog output, so you'll need to use HDMI for multi channel audio if you want high resolution audio or you can still use the optical output which will only give you standard Dolby digital and DTS. As I mentioned before, there's an HDMI output. That only goes up to 1080I while some of Toshiba's other players can go up to 1080P. That had a little bit of effect on the performance but not too much. It really depends on how good your tv is at the interlacing and that will depend whether the 1080I versus 1080P difference matters at all. The rest of the performance was very good. On HD dvd's the picture quality was excellent and on dvd's it was able to upscale regular dvd's pretty good. It wasn't as good as the step up HDXA2, but unless you're a real picture quality enthusiast, it'll probably do a good job. Overall this is a really good value if you wanna get into DH dvd cause it has most of the features that you want, but we can't give it our full recommendation only because of the ongoing format war and it's possible that HD dvd could lose. I'm Matthew Maskovciak and this is the Toshiba HDA2.
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