So it begins: Toshiba's HD-A3 falls to $99 at Circuit City, comes with 7 free HD DVDs
By Darren Murph 
posted Feb 20th 2008 9:26AM
posted Feb 20th 2008 9:26AM
[Thanks, Dustin]
posted Feb 20th 2008 9:26AM
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And it begins!
Could *this* be the final nail in HD-DVDs coffin?....
Neither of you have it right if your going for dramatic effect.
The correct phrase is: “And so it Begins!”
The nail in the coffin!
Isn't it more like...
"And so it Ends!"
Are the free HD-DVDs an immediate thing, or are do you send in for them? It always takes forever to get those "by mail" discs, and given the demise of the format, I'm somewhat skeptical about receiving the discs.
-Pie
Ans SO it Begins!!! lol
More like the "End of the $100 player" era ... maybe that price range will be seen again in about 4 or 5 years.
Yes, I'll take one of these.
I'll also need cassette deck, an analog cell phone, a typewriter, and a beeper
Heh. My HDMI cable costs more than this.
You paid more than $100 for an HDMI cable?
I wonder who the idiot is.
The nails are all in. This is the first shovel of dirt on the grave.
Boom-shaka-laka
That player looks like it was designed in the mid-80's.
Maybe if they marketed that early they might have won...
maybe...
why would people still want to buy hd-dvd now that its defunct?
look @ the price. Even tho the format is no longer being supported...it doesn't change the fact that you're getting full HD movies for the cheap. Hold folks over until Blu Ray becomes more affordable.:-)
The same reason people are still buying the 3DO on eBay. The world is a strange and magical place...
Beta players are still being sold on ebay too. The A30 is $130 on CC's site.
See comment above yours.
100/7 = $15 per movie. Not for a rental until your player dies. At which point I doubt you will want to buy another player for a dead format to keep playing theses movies.
Of course that is assuming these offers still arrive and that you are actually interested in the movies (limited selection).
I really can't see people rushing to pick these up. Maybe a bit lower in price if you need a DVD player. I am not the type of person that would buy another player when my current one works just because it comes with free movies.
You can buy a HD-DVD burner for your PC, grab HD torrents, and burn your own media. But stock up on blank HD-DVD discs just in case they start to disappear (is there an HD-DVD RW?). You could even buy blu-ray discs and rip and burn those to HD-DVD. For $99 there are a lot of ways to keep this thing going.
But remember, it's also a nice DVD upscaler.
That's my thinking but I'll wait for the HD-A35 to hit $100 or less.
I wouldn't be so sure. The XA2 is a superb upscaler. But the '3' series does not have Reon chip. Reports I read on avsforum are conflicting but it looks like the lowly A3 doesn't have anything worthwhile in it and is no better than your average DVD upsampling player. The A30 does have a reportedly good upscaling chip but the deinterlacing is average (in other words, bad) like with any other DVD player. Likewise for A35. So I'd grab A30 as a minimum, but I'd prefer XA2 if I could get it for $200, which probably won't happen. So I'll just wait for PS3 to drop price and become quieter (I already own one), because PS3 upsampling and deinterlacing is just as good as XA2 and it's not obsolete to boot - but it's too loud for movie playback for my taste.
And you can add a Monster HDMI cable for $69.99. What a freakin deal!!
I'd hit that if Netflix still supported HD-DVDs.
It still has every HD DVD except the ones just released . Even if I rented 3 movies every weekend it would still take me 2.5 years to watch every HD DVD, so I think it's worth it.
@zunq
Assuming that you would actually want to watch _every_ movie that has been released. And assuming you don't care about watching new movies.
But I guess it wouldn't be a bad deal if you want an upscaler, and your favorite movies are only out on HD DVD, and you're too impatient to wait for them to be ported to blu-ray, and too impatient to wait for blu-ray to drop in price. Other than that, I just can't see the justification for buying this.
It does. They just shipped out the Bourne Ultimatum today for me.
Shouldn't Toshiba be storing these things somewhere for the inevitable future museum display?
or for parts to keep supporting current owners.
Wait another month for prices to drop more.. Buy as many as you want, tear them apart and cannibalize their innards. Have fun with cheap blue lasers
Or, buy one now and take advantage of Circuit City's 30 day price guarantee if it goes down in the next 30 days..
Or, if it is at Walmart, they offer a 90 day return/exchange policy and price matching
If it is on clearance though, usually they don't won't adjust prices.
Yeah, why WOULD you buy a defunct player? Does it go well with your laserdisc player?
The bigger question is, who shops at Circuit City? Best Buy haters?
Yes, that would be myself. Ive never had a good experience with bestbuy. To be honest, I dont think ive ever purchased anything from bestbuy, ever! If I cant find it at wal-mart I go to Newegg.
If I was in the US I would definately do so.
This fire sale looks to have on the units and when it does so on the HD-DVD's too, it'll be so dirt cheap to get a massive library of 1080p content that won't degrade over time.
Fair enough, I'll have to buy BR movies for anything new coming out, but I am more than tempted and spending at least half or more on what I would have to do for a similar high-end Blue-ray set up and the large library of movies/documentaries.
Be stubborn if you wish, but I would go ahead and spend less than half of my money on the the same amount of content and hardware that will last a lifetime and will look as amazing in 1080p as the same Blue-ray movie will.
It's a totally different scenario compared to laser disk. How many movies could you even buy on lazerdisk when they were trying to promote it? There are hundreds of movies just waiting to go for next to nothing!
"Yes, that would be myself. Ive never had a good experience with bestbuy. To be honest, I dont think ive ever purchased anything from bestbuy, ever!"
Ahh...then how could you have had a bad experience there? Did you get attacked by a horde of rabid blue shirts? Or maybe you tripped walking in the door?
someone needs to open a HD-DVD to Blu-ray conversion shop.
Or you can do it in the comfort of your own home. For a price...
http://gizmodo.com/358467/turn-your-hd-dvds-into-blu+ray
actually, I meant swicthing the laser in the HD-DVD player to blu-ray.
So many dopes here.... They ask "why would they buy it"?
Why not ask why people still buy regular DVD players.
Why not ask why people still buy regular DVDs.
You're elitist. And it's not 'the norm'. Most people just don't care. If they want to waste plastic buying a ROM, it really doesn't matter; they're doing it wrong.
does it play divx?
its a solid looking dvd player , and the films are worth that alone.
ill buy one as a dvd player as im not bothered about buying overpriced HD films yet.
No DivX or XviD support.
No DivX
I think he meant "divx" not "DivX" - at least, that would be more ironic.
I was wondering whether this is not some kind of a advertisement campaign. Indeed Time Warner, who owns Engadget, is one of the board directors of the blu-ray disk association. In other words, they have been injecting a whole lot of $$$ (like Toshiba) to win the market. Now that they have won, there's not a single day without a post about the "format war".
So dear Warner people, we heard it very well. You won, bravo. Now, please, give us some good small cheap and well-designed blu-ray devices and let's just no more discuss about this.
PS: I do not own a HD-DVD nor a Blu-ray... I stick with DVDs for the time being.
Perhaps if they changed the offer to "all the free HD DVDs you can carry", they might clear them out quicker.
I really don't understand why there are so many HD DVD haters here at Engadget. When you look at HD DVD and BR players side by side, they were equal on pretty much every count except one, storage. A BR disc can hold 50GB to HD DVD's 30. For me it's not a big deal. Most of the extra's the studio's use that space for simply aren't worth the time or effort to try and watch it. I'd rather give up the extra's to get a high quality transfer of the film itself.