one and only 360 HD-DVD Drive thread & LINKS - Page 7

I watched King Kong earlier this evening and the picture was outstanding on my 37" Dell LCD, detail and clarity was excellent, I really felt right there in the jungle. Sound was great as well, clear dialog and steering in the surrounds. This is my third HD-DVD viewing so far since Friday (in between playing Gears), watched Corpse Bride and Aeon Flux and both were also excellent. I havent watched Batman yet which was to be my first, probably next weekend.

No issues with any discs so far, overall an excellent weekend with Gears and HD-DVD!

I had my first minor issue with the HD DVD drive. I put Spy Game in the drive and it was not recognized. I ejected the disc and put it in again and it worked fine. Not sure why that happened, but...

The movie has played perfectly for the first 50 minutes.

Just wait until you watch Batman Begins HD-DVD. I had seen maybe the 1st 20 mins of that movie on HBO-HD & the PQ was impressive, but last night I popped in my HD-DVD copy & the PQ is awesome, so clear, great transfer of this movie to HD-DVD!

I went to CC with a friend to get the HD-DVD player for the 360. He had one of the coupons for $40 off a purchase of $199+. Watched pieces of Training Day, Van Hel, & KONG. DAMN. It was all that and then some. PQ is way above upconvert! 360 player is the way into the HD video disc world if you have/plan to get a 360. For $175, that's with taxes, you would be crazy to pass this up.
P.S. King Kong has the best PQ of the listed movies! I watched the T-Rex fight, man that was some visual stimulation

link to coupon, in case you didn't know http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...&&#post8878242

Thanks! I am going to try for a price adjustment tomorrow!

I have a Hitachi 50VA720 RP LCD and I must say the picture is absolutely stunning. I am sure it will be on your Sony too. I also have a IOData LinkPlayer 2 and have been streaming various HD trailers and clips to my tv and the PQ of the 360 addon is considerably better. The addon drive is well worth the money. The only problem is I have run out of movies to watch.

JRad

Here's a review at DVDtown.com

Reveiw

Not as good as a Toshiba player, but a good option for 360 owners.

not a very well informed review - but a review still the same.

http://www.dvdtown.com/news/reviewof...ddvdaddon/4186

Sorry I have to contest this one. I have the 60" XBR1 and my movies look great on them. Maybe it is the type of movies you are playing. I am currently deployed in Iraq but check my post history as I posted up pictures from Prison Break Season 1 on DVD. I am satisfied with component and I am not losing sleep about HDMI. If it comes it comes but the quality of picture delivers with component on my SXRD.

Again if anyone wants to again see picture quality of standard DVD with a 1080P display then check the post history and see it yourself. We have slow connection over here so it takes time to get from page to page.

Yes, im looking forward to it. My big problem (if you can call it that) is when I tried a brief test of the chase scene with the Tumbler the sound was absolutely incredible! Which means that now it has to be a weekend viewing if I dont want the neighbours banging on my ceiling as there is no way I wont be cranking this one up! What a problem to have, right? And yes I was also impressed with the PQ from my brief look, comparing to the upconverted SD really shows the leap in PQ.

This review doesn't A-B the Component/VGA cable. The VGA unpconverts SD-DVD I think.

Compatibility doesn't mean it can display at that resolution. It just means it will be able to convert the image to the max resolution of your projector which is 720. Sorry if this has been answered already.

Yesterday morning I picked up the add-on from the local CC. The clerk told me they had received ten of them and I was buying the last one. And that one had already been returned.

I got home, installed the upgrade disc, connected the drive, the drive was recognized and all seemed fine.

Then I inserted KK. It just sat there with "Reading" on the screen. It wouldn't do anything. I then tried an SD disc and the screen went black in 10-15 seconds. But it wouldn't do anything after that.

I tried rebooting the system. I then tried reformatting the drive on the 360 to really reset everything. I then re-updated the software and hooked everything back up. Still nothing.

I can't beleive 2 out of 10 of these drives are bad. 20% failures is way to high for a consumer good. I finally returned the thing to CC and I'll now look for other options.

This sucks.

This "review" needs to be buried in a very deep hole and the author never, ever allowed to write a review again. It gets off track immediately with a boring (and not always factually correct) dissertation on console history, specifically add-ons. Talking to Circuit City and EB Games store managers and using the basis of those conversations as pseudo-market research is laughable - "they have reported strong interest and sales in the unit". This writer is also deluded by the notion that in order to achieve the best possible picture, it's necessary for a completely digital pathway to exist between the player and the display - " the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive does not allow for the best possible picture". He later reports - "I noticed a slight difference in colors and the amount of difference in detail was minimal." My guess is he didn't bother to tweak the display at all for the component-in. Lastly (and there are many more points to attack in this article), this is a completely ridiculous statement related to the appearance - "The first noticeable shortcoming is that the unit has only one button on its droll gray face."

Overall review grade: D-

(FWIW, I've got the Xbox360 HDDVD drive and a Toshiba HD-A1; they both look incredible, I discern no notable difference in PQ between the two.)

I agree the statement that "HDMI is needed to have the best picture quality" is a false statement, however Cnet, websites, magazines have all basically said the same thing, as have sales people at virtually all the electronic stores and many people in these forums, so he is not alone on the misimformation, just wrong.
It all depends on implementation, cables and devices used, VGA, HDMI, Component can all give equally good PQ.
The lack of buttons for playback and navigation on the front of unit is a valid complaint, but very minor inconvenience for the addon and playstaion3, as if one would loose or misplace the remote a game controller you would be out of luck controlling the unit.

It has kinda, but thanks for chiming in with a finalized answer. At this point, I don't care what the damn projector is doing in terms of scaling/resolution, all I can say is that set to 1080i and via component it looks SPECTACULAR!

Still not sure if it's better/worse then HD cable though which I've had for a few years, it seems somewhat program dependent. Some of the stuff on INHD is hard to beat!!

There is an alternative explanation:

From your description it sounds like you may have made the same mistake in setting up the system twice. Many with this problem solved it by rebooting the system before using the drive. This is a required part of the installation. You do not mention doing that in either of your two installations. It sounds like you tried to use the player immediately after updating the system. ???

Do you really mean that you reformated your HDD or do you mean that you performed HDD cache clear maintenance on it?

I suspect that a lot of the returns will be for this reason.

BTW, 2/10 from one store does not a 20% overall failure rate make.

If you lose or misplace the remote and the game controller you have more serious issues than being unable to control the unit.

I didn't even bother using the included disk. I'm connected to the internet and when I put in KK, I got a message to do an update and the system rebooted automatically. Then KK started up a few seconds later. Too easy.

Karlw2000:

A bunch of guys are using the included disk to update their systems and then not rebooting before using the player.

I have the facility to take YUV 4:4:4 1080p screenshots directly from the Xbox VGA output (I posted a thread with some gaming 1080p shots elsewhere in this forum). Unfortunately the HD DVD unit is not released until December 1 in the UK, so I'm afraid I can't take any shots until then. Oh well, only two weeks... provided I even get a unit of course

There is no need to reboot after the update. It is not required....

Anyway all is well in the Blount household this morning. However.

I found another drive this morning and sent my wife off to retrieve it. No problem, she picked up the last one at the local Game Crazy. Over the phone we got it hooked up and it is running great. She's impressed with the picture.

Here's the gotcha and warning

When she was opening the package this morning and describing the contents, it became very clear to me that Circuit City had indeed sold me a used/returned unit.

The one I got from Circuit City yesterday had the batteries already in the remote, the KK movie was not shrink-wrapped, and there was a green plastic sleeve just laying across the top/inside of the package.

The one my wife picked up this morning had all the opposites from above.

When I was at CC and the clerk told me that they already had one returned, I specifically asked if this one was the returned one. He told me No, it's illegal for us to sell used goods as new. Well, I guess they just don't care about that.

I called an spoke to the manager and he was a little sympathetic and did offer us a gift card for our troubles. But he wasn't too interested in setting his employees straight. I hope he does anyway.

So after this long read, just be careful of what you buy at CC.

I bought the 360 HD-DVD Player a few days ago at Circuit City and I returned it today, because it made King Kong HD-DVD and some of my sd-dvds freeze every 5 minutes. The customer service person said that they had 6 units returned to them from the 10 units that they had in stock.

watched KK twice so far and V for Vendetta once and no problems. i love this thing.

Just bought one today and watched King Kong. Compared to the SD version it is much sharper but also smoother with richer colors. It's not the jump that I experienced from VHS to DVD but I am pleased with what I saw. For 159 dollars at CC after using the coupon that I found on this forum I think it is a excellent deal.

Here you go, mates. A proper review of the HD-DVD addon

http://www.hidef.com/hardware-access...iba-hd-a1.html

This will be great, thanks!

I picked mine up last night. No problems installing. KK looks outstanding! The only downfall I can see is having to watch movies twice. Once to gawk at the picture, and again to take in the story!

Yep, that's a good review.

Yep, ridiculous nonsense. I have my A1 hooked up by both HDMI and Component to my HP 65" DLP. I OFTEN do a switch to check out quality difference. None.