Toshiba’s HD-DVD players finally arrived on April 18th - not with a bang, but a trickle. The relatively few units to reach dealers’ shelves were purchased almost immediately. One Best Buy in Manhattan received only three units, and only three pre-recorded disks were available for them - The Last Samurai, Serenity, and The Phantom of the Opera. Toshiba is air-freighting more players to the U.S., and intends to restock 3,000 retailers by the end of next week, Evan Powell reported today on Projector Central. At least vendors weren’t soaking customers for the discs: They were available on-line for as little as $18.99. Players that support Blu-ray Disk, HD-DVD’s competing format, will probably not be available until June.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of MDTV Retailer

Powell reported his initial experiences using Toshiba’s $499 HD-A1 HD-DVD player, and he was enthusiastic. "It is like upgrading to a higher resolution, higher performance projector for a fraction of the cost," Powell wrote. " The image quality was superior to any of the previous demos I’d seen-pure, rock solid, pristine, razor sharp, highly detailed, and virtually artifact-free are just some of the superlatives that come to mind. It actually surpasses broadcast HDTV, for it is in the same class in terms of image resolution, but it is free of the noise and compression artifacts that are part of the broadcast signal." One of his associates added, "After seeing this it will be hard to look at standard DVD again."

Powell went on to say that you don’t need a native 1080p projector to get spectacular results from HD-DVD. Indeed it’s hard to tell the difference between HD-DVD output displayed on a 720p projector vs. being displayed on a 1080p projector. Powell said its hard to imagine Blu-ray offering a better image than HD-DVD, and he wonders whether the additional capacity will matter much to consumers, especially with the initial Blu-ray players coming in at twice Toshiba’s price.

The New York Times’ Ken Belson quoted Don Patrican, Executive VP of the Maxell Corporation of America, as saying, "Toshiba is in a gold rush by being first, and now they can pan for that gold." Maxell will be manufacturing both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs so should profit from the success of either or both.

The first horse is out of the starting gate, but this is a long term, not short-term race. Listen for more from this announcer.