Ask anyone who already owns an HD DVD player and a Blu-ray player and you will likely get the same answer as to which format is likely to win a format war that no consumer, AV publication or retailer wanted to see happen, and they will tell you they simply can’t pick a winner. Blu-ray has had some controversy about the chipset and the quality of the overall video output of the one and only $1,000 Samsung player on the market. HD DVD leads in the price category, with Toshiba players at $799 and $499 and an RCA player at $500, but that is about the only place HD DVD leads. Anyone trying to use an HDMI cable to connect their HD DVD player has most likely found painful connectivity issues, requiring an analog video cable for a digital HD video format. Players have needed and greatly benefited from firmware updates from ...

Ricoh, a Japanese based office equipment maker, announced Thursday their intention to release a combo HD DVD/Blu-ray format player by next year. Currently, HD DVD & Blu-ray are battling it out to see who will be the new dominant high definition format. Thus, the current players will only support one format or the other. Despite yes and no reports of a dual format player from Toshiba and Samsung Ricoh has officially announced their dual format player.

Toshiba has announced their RD-A1 HD DVD recorder. The recorder comes complete with a 1 Terabyte (TB) hard drive for up to approximately 130 hours of high definition video and audio.

HD DVD has officially been launched albeit, very conservatively. Early reports from AVRev.com staff (we bought six players already) speak glowingly of the picture as well as the sound from the new format. But all is not well under the hood of the first batch of players. 45 second delays between rebooting the player (note: Microsoft and Intel are behind HD DVD) are really causing GenX and GenY users to have to take a deep breath as they wait for a movie to load.

Toshiba has introduced the first laptop capable of playing next-generation, high-definition DVDs. The Qosmio G35-AV650 supports the HD DVD format, which Toshiba helped develop, and also plays standard DVDs. Its dual drive can write data onto both standard DVDs and dual-layer discs, which can store twice as much information.