Amazon: $129 Toshiba HD-A3 with 7 HD DVDs and free shipping

Guess what? It's yet another rock bottom sale day for Toshiba's HD-A3 HD DVD player. This time it's Amazon serving up the HD-A3 with 7 HD DVD titles and free shipping for just $129. The deal combines the extended 5 HD DVD "perfect offer" with Warner Bros' 300 and Universal's The Bourne Identity HD DVD titles thrown in for kicks. That's two extra discs and $21 less than the official $150 dealio. Crazy, we know.

[Thanks, Andrew]

[Ironhide Delta Posted Jan 18th 2008 3:30PM]

actually BB is also selling the a30 for a good price. Looking at about 269ish i think?

[Kurto2021 Posted Jan 18th 2008 2:15PM]

Is it really a war when Toshiba and Sony are giving millions of dollars to the studios in order to be exclusive?

Sure would like to have seen that 600 million the BD Group just dropped for Warner and Fox was actually used to subsidize the players.

It's a lobbying war not a format war. The consumer has no choice.

[itisallaboutme Posted Jan 18th 2008 3:27PM]

By the way, this sounds like a good deal.

[itisallaboutme Posted Jan 18th 2008 3:38PM]

I threw in a SD DVD into my PS3 with HDMI and saw what an upconverted image looks like on 1080p. It doesn't look all that great when you compare it to the newer formats. On its own the image looked just "okay" though years ago when DVD first came out they were FANTASTIC. Compared to laserdisc they were the second coming of sharpness. Now days though they're still the same in terms of sharpness, but compared to HD-DVD/Blu-ray they don't even come close. It's like looking at your 3MP digital picture at 16x20 size and comparing it to a 39MP 16x20 picture. So upconverting isn't the way to go. I'm sure we'll be saying the same thing once 4k - 7k digital television/DVD/Downloads comes out.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 18th 2008 6:15PM]

I don't see 300 on blue ray....

[JP23 Posted Jan 18th 2008 4:09PM]

What ever happened to the HD-DVD troll we used to have on here that was sprouting off on how HD was going to kick Blu's ass to the curb soon?
He showed up on all of the other HD/Blu threads but I haven't seen him in a few weeks.
Could he be out trying to buy every HD-DVD movie know to man so he has something to watch in the future?

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 18th 2008 4:30PM]

Nope, thanks anyway. Not interested.
I'll just be taking that PS3 over there, thanks...

[rcappo Posted Jan 18th 2008 10:34PM]

Well, I am in the market for a DVD player, and it looks like I have to go with HD-DVD. I currently have 40 regular DVDs and my computer DVD drive will not be hooked up to the new projector. And I need some way to play the old movies in an upconverting way. (A 1080p upconverting DVD player costs $77 right now).

The movies that I want are out on HD-DVD. Sure, some like Blue Planet are out on both, but the Matrix and the Bourne trilogy are on HD-DVD. And I was going to buy the most recent Bourne film, but it comes with the player now. ($24.99) The only other movies that I don't own that I want to buy are the Lord of the Rings. I don't care if I have to buy a Blu-ray ripped version that is burnt onto HD-DVD discs from Asia or Russia though (or d/l from some Swedish website...). The Good Shepard, Flags Of Our Fathers, Battlestar Glactica, Serenity Apollo 13 and Top Gun are all on HD-DVD. So it seems the movies I want to watch are on HD-DVD. I don't watch many 3D animated movies (which do look good at 1080p on Blu-ray that I saw at Best Buy), comic book movies, Harry Potter, or Pirates of the Caribbean. And I'm not sure which movies are available for both formats right now.

And I also like that there are no region codes. And the cryptography/security on the HD-DVD discs isn't as bad as the Blu-ray ones.

You also get 7 free movies with the purchase of one of these players.

Yeah, I'm not sure how long this 'format war' will go on for, and I'm still not sure why movie studios are taking sides at all in this. ($$$ I wonder how much Sony paid Warner, and now the blu-ray prices are much higher) But I predict that it will go on for a few more years. And while I was on the sidelines watching it unfold, and even if I don't know what the future will hold for HD-DVD, I have to pick HD-DVD because the price allows me to buy the player, Planet Earth, The 3 Matrix films, Serenity, and the 7 other movies that come with it for $315.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 18th 2008 11:36PM]

Cypher: I know what you're thinking, 'cause right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually, I've been thinking it ever since I got here: Why oh why didn't I take the BLUE pill?