Digital Trends

With a street price close to $300, the Toshiba HD-A20 HD DVD player breaks the Hi-Def mold with plenty of features at an affordable price.

Snip:

"It may not look as cool as one of those Blu-ray players, but the HD-A20 isn’t crippled and can play CDs as well as home-brewed discs (but no JPEG, MP3 or other music files). Like all HD DVD players, it’s much deeper than a standard DVD player and is also more “PC” in how it functions - so things like the fast forward being jerky on this model is unchanged from those that came out before it. However, there have been some improvements - it weights half as much as the first generation HD-A1 and the basic star-tup sequence has improved. Still, you’ll be waiting up to a minute for the disc to pop out for insertion, and another dozens of seconds for the image to begin playing. The worst part of all this is that if you make a mistake and hit the Stop button now or at any future time (instead of Pause). the disc will start all over again from the beginning. Another bummer is the remote. True it’s lighter and more responsive than earlier models, but it’s missing backlighting or even glow-in-the-dark capabilities to aid in finding the right button to press. Since there’s a whole lot of these tiny guys, that makes using it in the dark really difficult."

Read the full Toshiba HD-A20 review