My father-in-law got a new 42" HDTV for himself this yearand had a lot of trouble getting itset up with HD content. Thankfully, I had found a Toshiba HD-A2 on sale at Wal Mart for $100 way back on November 16th. I bought it and put it up for him for Christmas along with Transformers on HD-DVD. Well, I finally got to try it out last weekend and, after waiting an hour for it to update its firmware I must say, I'm pretty impressed. HD-DVD is a worthy successor to the standard DVD. Its too bad HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are stuck in a pointless format war, but at $100 and its still an upconverting DVD player, its worth the risk to possibly pick the losing format.

I'm open to discussion on HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, but I'll state my bais to get it out of the way: my personal preference is HD-DVD for the cheaper players. The quality of the video is about the same, from what I've seen. The selection of movies on Blu-Ray is currently better, but HD-DVD is catching up, both are still lacking terribly compared to standard DVD. I don't know that either one is really winning and personally I don't watch enough movies to warrant a purchase of either for myself.