Toshiba HD-XA2 Review-
We all know many of the first gen players stunk it up, thankfully we are starting to see second generation players come in and fix many of the problems early adopters were facing. The HD-XA2, XA1 replacement, have nice improvements incuding a much improved boot time and 1080p playback capability. A big plus to the setup is the inclusion of a Silicon Optix Reon HQV processor to handle scaling and deinterlacing duties. Hrm, I wonder how that would score on the HQV benchmark ;).
From the article:
Once I became acquainted with all the user controls the HD-XA2 was put through a series of tests. All evaluations were performed using the Pioneer FHD-1 plasma monitor. The Pioneer is a 1920×1080p 50-inch display. All test were done with the Pioneer in its “Pure” picture mode selecting the Dot-by-Dot aspect ratio, which bypasses Pioneer’s internal scaler providing a straight feed from the Toshiba HD DVD player to the monitor. The HD-XA2 was set for 1080p/60hz output for evaluations, though 1080i output was also briefly sampled and evaluated. The Pioneer monitor properly deinterlaces 1080i sources into 1080 progressive, providing similar images in either mode.