HDTV Magazine Reviews

Have you ever wondered why special features on DVD don’t look as good as the movie you watched? Maybe you've wondered why some of your DVDs don’t look as good as others? Or why Blu-ray Hollywood movies appear to have more detail than concerts or documentaries? HQV Benchmark has a testing regimen to help you figure all of that out!

HQV Benchmark is...

So you want to watch movies with Netflix "Watch Instantly", but you aren't thrilled about sitting in front of your computer to do it? Netflix and Roku have partnered to bring the Watch Instantly functionality to your TV. We have one of these players and have spent a week putting it through its paces.

The player can be purchased for $99.99 from the Roku website and requires...

The TV looks visually appealing and has a high build quality. There is a clear plastic frame that goes around the TV. The TV weighs 84 pounds (38 Kg) with the pedestal and measures 49.7" (126 cm) wide by 31.3" (79.5 cm) high by 17.7" (32 cm) deep (4.8" (12 cm) without the pedestal). We immediately took the TV off the default setting and changed it to cinema. Cox cable looked very bad. So bad that we recommended switching to satellite. Braden has Cox as one of his sources so his impression was that Cox does not look that bad on his TVs. It could be that this TV does not do well with compressed sources. OTA HD looked much better. In general OTA digital channels looked better than the SD coming from the Cox cable box.

We then popped in a Blu-ray disc...

Back in Episode #178 (June, 2007) we did a feature on the Vista Media Center. For that review we used an HP m8000n to run the Media Center. We talked about the features of the Media Center and how one could use the computer to run spreadsheets during the day and watch live TV or movies using an extender device at night. If you are not familiar with the features of the Media Center, that would be a good show to go back and listen to. We will only be covering specific features of the Media Center as they pertain to the DSM-750...

In case you hadn't heard, the HD format war is over. The Blu-ray camp struck a huge win just before CES when Warner Brothers announced they would be moving exclusively to Blu-ray by mid year, tipping the scales majorly in Blu-ray's favor. Then, in February 2008, Toshiba announced it would discontinue the development, manufacturing and marketing of HD DVD, officially ending the format war. They did, however, confirm that they would honor the warranty of all HD DVD players.

The Toshiba HD DVD players featured in this review were the latest (and as it turns out, last) generation to be released. While it may seem an empty effort to review them now since HD DVD has removed itself from the race, these third generation players from Toshiba have a performance response at crazy low prices to be reckoned with and deserve the full story.