It's supposed to be slightly better picture and definetely better sound, although compared to the fibre output the same. If that makes any sense. I must admit I doubted there would be any difference in picture quality, but even from dvd to hd-dvd its a noticable difference, and here is where i noticed it... the shading, around objects and people faces it almost as a 3d effect because you see actual shadows from the object on the items around it. very cool

 

Does it make blacks and dark colors show up any richer? Like on a movie in a night scene, the sky or background may be black, fading to dark blue, and I can usually see where the shades change. Make sense? Or is that just my TV, and not the DVD?

 

Hmmm, you have me convinced. I will have to get one for the folks for Christmas. And you said they can play both formats? HD-DVD and reg. DVD? AWESOME!

 

Yes, actually they bump up the res on regular dvd's, some of the regular dvd players do this now, it will make a reg dvd look a little better at 1080p, but not near as good as the hd-dvd's

 

What model did you get? I'm all over the internets trying to find something inexpensive, and all I can find are "upconverting" players that offer only "1080i-like" performance.

 

toshiba hda2



http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Toshiba-HD-...roductDetail.do

 

But what if my TV is not 1080p? I need to do some more research on this before I buy one.

 

if its hd, it should be 1080i or 1080p, if not then you wont get much of anything out of the hd gear, even hdtv as that is higher resolution 480 vs 1080

 

1080i or was it 1080p is what just recently came out. well, the TV is HD, so it's one of the two. it's about....3 years old now.

 

there's very little difference, same res one is interlaced the other progressive scan