Still On The Wall Hd Dvd Or Bd

The Toshiba HD-XA2, Sony BDP-S300 and PS3, and the Samsung BD-P1200 all have HDMI 1.3. The new Panasonic may as well.

That said, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. The player is required to be able to decode advanced audio, which it can then pass as PCM to your receiver via HDMI. In fact most software titles and ALL current hardware won't allow you to transfer the codecs to your receiver to be decoded. It MUST be done in the player. The only other major advancement of HDMI 1.3 is Deep Color, which neither HD DVD nor Blu-Ray supports.

I see the A2 is down to $270 at Amazon. Even if HD DVD tanked in a year what big investment is that? In the meantime it's a great sd upscaling player as well. No brainer and no need to fret over this kind of cost.

Yes. No major spec changes have occurred since the current generation of players were released, and none seem to be on the horizon.


No.


The XA2 does. However, it is basically irrelevant for HD media players, for a variety of reasons which have already been hashed out in great detail. Use the search function to track this down - there's a lot out there already.


It won't matter for the BD players, as they will all become out-of-date, spec wise, this fall. (with the possible exception of the PS3, which supposedly will be upgradable.)