Toshiba HD-E1 HD DVD Player

Back in September 2006, Toshiba announced that, contrary to prior belief, Europe's first HD DVD players would in fact be based on second-generation hardware, rather than simply being re-purposed equivalents to the first slow, occasionally glitchy, but ultimately very impressive American players (which DVD Times imported and reviewed in early July).

Some of the main criticisms directed at the hardware for the American and Japanese HD DVD launches were related to the appearance and size of the players. The HD-E1 packs the same HD DVD playback functionality of these launch players into a much slimmer, much more attractive case, and the end result is a player that looks a lot more like a piece of A/V equipment than the boxy HD-A1 did. Although the aesthetics could still be improved, it's a far better result.

Although the HD-E1 was announced at the beginning of September and a limited number of units trickled into stores, DVD Times was unable to receive a review unit until now, so we apologise for the untimeliness of this review. Now that it's here though, we can say that it's a very good value High Definition disc solution despite having some kinks with its Standard Definition upscaling. Read on for the full story.

Remote Control

Although it's flat and boxy enough to be classed under the category that we reviewers politely call "ergonomically challenged", the HD-E1's remote control is, again, an improvement over the sharp-edged design that American buyers had to get used to. It's thin and light, which doesn't make it feel incredibly rugged, but it's easy enough to use, as the Play, Pause, Rewind and Fast Forward buttons are placed near the directional pad and menu buttons. There's no colour coding to the buttons (except for the names of the functions that allow the remote to control your TV), and there are plenty of them, which may be a slight psychological hurdle for some to get used to, but there's no real usability issues once you learn where everything is. I was pleased to see that the remote has an Open/Close button on it (who wants to crouch down waiting for the disc tray to open AFTER getting off the couch?)


Speaking of the directional pad, a most welcome improvement is that the finicky rocker-button from the HD-A1 has been replaced with 8 directional buttons (the 4 normal directions plus diagonals, a feature intended for interactive applications), which are much easier to use. The number buttons, and the button that accesses the Setup menu, are also accessible from the front surface, as unlike the original American version, the HD-E1 does not hide any buttons under irritating flaps.

An unusual complaint I have is that the machine's Infra-red sensor could have a better range. I found that I had to point the remote control directly at the machine for commands to register. Fortunately, it wasn't affected by distance, just the angle, so it's not really a problem.

Picture Tweaks

Unlike many conventional DVD players, the HD-E1 doesn't have an extensive range of picture tweak options. This is not necessarily a problem, although I do like it when players include Sharpness controls that can actually be used to Soften the picture a little, in case I'm watching a disc that has a lot of artificial sharpening of its own.

Most importantly, the HD-E1's Setup menu allows you to select what resolution you'd like to send to your HDTV. The options are "Up to 480i/576i", which in the case of normal DVDs, simply reads the data from the disc and outputs it as an Interlaced, Standard-def video signal, meaning that your TV's processing will take care of the Scaling and Deinterlacing duties (not recommended). The second option, "Up to 480p/576p", means that the HD-E1 will deinterlace the video, but your TV will do the up-scaling by itself. The remaining options are "Up to 720p" and "Up to 1080i" (I used the latter for most of this review), which I'd imagine will be the most selected ones - it is an HD DVD player, after all.


I should also point out that these output resolution settings affect all discs, both SD and HD. Selecting the 480i/576i option will actually downscale 1080p HD DVD discs to 480i. There's no way of instructing the HD-E1 to, for example, output 480i/576i for SD DVDs, and 1080i for HD DVDs, which is a little annoying for people who would rather send a pure signal to a video processor to upscale itself. Fortunately for the rest of us, the upscaling modes on the player are good, meaning it can be permanently set to 1080i without too many problems.

Secondly, we're given control over an option called "Picture Mode", which lets you control how the Deinterlacing circuitry operates (this is effective for Standard-Def DVDs only, as HD DVDs store 1080p video). The choices are "Film", "Video", and "Auto". As I'll explain later, the "Auto" mode didn't do the best job of differentiating between Video and Film content, which meant that I had to manually enable Film mode in order to get a jaggy-free picture for SD DVDs. (This option will have no effect if you're using the 480i/576i output setting, as these bypass the player's Deinterlacing).

The only other picture tweak is one called "PAL/Auto". I assumed that this would be an option to output NTSC discs with a PAL-60 colour signal (for the Composite and S-Video outputs), but all it in fact does is lock out NTSC disc playback, giving the error message, "The disc is NTSC. Cannot play the disc". Set to "Auto", the player would play both NTSC and PAL discs, leaving me quite baffled as to why this feature exists.

There are no picture tweaks available while a disc is playing.

In-depth Quality Analysis: HD DVD (1080p/24)

The HD-E1 does an almost-perfect job of video playback from the exceptionally capable HD DVD format, which means that it is every bit as good as the American Toshiba HD-A1 that came before it in this area. This is excellent, because the HD-A1 mesmerised video enthusiasts around the world upon its release. Details from the best HD DVD discs are nice and crispy, just the way you'd expect, and of course, no additional picture tampering goes on.

Actually, the performance is so identical that the HD-E1 retains one of the HD-A1's small flaws - the Chroma Upsampling Error. This means that the edges of coloured areas appear very slightly jagged, but remember that with 1080 lines of video, the problem is very difficult to spot in "real world" viewing conditions - unless you use a projector, perhaps. In fact, unless you have a 1920x1080 resolution display (and are sitting close to it), you may never see it, because the down-scaling done by any lower-resolution display devices will in fact conceal the error. Hopefully, Toshiba's high end HD-XE1 will fix this slight problem. All in all though, the HD DVD playback from the HD-E1 gave me plenty to smile about.

In fact, although not strictly related to the video processing of the player, I was glad to see that the slight issues the earlier HD-A1 had with occasional stuttering whilst playing HD movies, have been resolved. Similarly, the excellent interactive menus found on HD DVD discs (thanks to HD DVD's "HDi" system) respond quicker than before.

When the American HD-A1 was first launched, it did a poor job of down-scaling 1080p HD DVDs for 720p output, meaning that owners of 720p HDTVs were reliant on their TV's capabilities to accept the higher-resolution 1080i signal and correctly scale this down. This was later improved with a firmware upgrade to bring the downscaled 720p quality up to a high standard, and unsurprisingly, the HD-E1's later introduction means that it benefits from the latest developments - downscaling to 720p looks excellent, so if you have an older (or cheaper) display that throws away resolution when fed a 1080i image, you can use the 720p downscaling mode and still see fantastic quality video. However, I still recommend that you use the 1080i output mode if your TV does a good job with it, because many LCD TVs have panels that are actually 768p instead of 720p resolution. It's usually better to send 1080i and scale down rather than send 720p, which would mean that the TV would have to do some slight up-scaling and generate the extra 48 lines.

Of course, if you're lucky enough to have a Full HD 1920x1080 display, you should obviously use 1080i mode.

You'll notice how I'm talking about 1080i here, despite HD DVD using 1080p to store its video. This is because the HD-E1 does not output 1080p. You might think that this is Toshiba trying to spite buyers of the lower-end model, but it's actually because the current generation of HD video decoding chips are actually not 1080p capable. Players that boast 1080p output typically have an additional chip inside to convert the picture back to 1080p, in the hope that this additional chip will do a better job at the conversion than the one inside the user's display.

When it's done properly, converting film content from 1080i to 1080p is a totally seamless process, resulting in no jagged lines. But, many current 1920x1080p TV sets do not do this properly. An example of one affected model is the popular Sony KDL-40W2000. Even if your display is not entirely up to scratch in this department, the small jaggy flaws with pictures of this high a resolution are very hard to detect, so a 1080i player is still a great investment. You may want to wait for the HD-XE1, however, which has a 1080p-capable design, and will give a TV that accepts 1080p video no room for error in this department.

Just to be completely sure that both the original American HD-A1 and the HD-E1 were producing suitably identical results, I made two copies of a Test Pattern disc and played it in both players. I couldn't detect any difference between the two, which means that the HD-E1 contains the same excellent disc playback quality, albeit in a much smaller and faster-loading package. Very impressive.

In-depth Quality Analysis: SD DVD Playback & Upscaling

To put the Standard Definition backwards compatibility features of the HD-E1 through their paces, I firstly used the THX Optimizer application (found on many DVD titles) to check that the HD-E1 was passing Blacker Than Black shades. I'm pleased to report that over HDMI connected to a Sony KDL-40W2000 HDTV, the blacker than black shades appeared, meaning that the player won't be responsible for any detail that gets lost in dark areas of films.

I also used some animated titles to see if the HD-E1 had any Chroma Upsampling Error problems, which manifest themselves as jagged edges around areas of colour. All players tend to handle the Upsampling of the coloured parts of the image (which are stored at half-resolution on DVD to conserve space) differently, but some do this in a way that leads to the said coloured jaggies. The HD-E1 did appear to have some sort of jaggedness to the edges of colours, but it was not the most severe instance I've ever seen of the effect (in fact, it's comparatively minor to many other affected players).

The same results for both of these tests were true when using the Component Video outputs instead of HDMI, for those of you out there without HDMI-capable displays.

After verifying these as starting points, I moved onto analysing how the player's Deinterlacing circuitry converted movement from Standard-Def DVDs.

If you're not interested in how the HD-E1 plays American/Japanese standard NTSC discs and only have European PAL discs, then skip to the PAL video playback analysis.

SD Playback: NTSC Film with Progressive Flag (nearly all film releases)

This analysis might not actually be of much use, seeing as the player is locked to Region 2 with seemingly no clear or easy way of unlocking. This means that the only NTSC discs it'll play are ones from Japan, or others that happen to be region-free.

The US discs I did actually get to play on the HD-E1 did look great, though. There were no jaggy motion problems, which is good but not at all surprising, as I've never seen a player that can't play this type of disc correctly.

SD Playback: NTSC Film without Progressive Flag (US discs from small distributors, or TV shows originally shot on Film)

Some discs are released without special pointers that unintentionally help Progressive Scan DVD players display the clearest motion. In these cases, the player has to detect the correct movement pattern on its own to avoid jaggedness.

Oddly, the HD-E1 did not not properly display the race-car test clip from the Silicon Optix HQV benchmark disc when the Film mode was forced on in the picture menu, resulting in the details in the background losing detail and flickering. But, it displayed correctly using the "Auto" setting. This is unusual, but as it's possible to get good results, I consider it more of an annoyance than a fatal flaw.

Unfortunately, when I tried another disc without Progressive Flags, no setting would give the correct results, which is odd, but keep in mind that very few titles of this type are released.

SD Playback: PAL Film

PAL film playback is an area that some devices struggle with - even if they play American NTSC films properly. This is because clear playback of PAL movies relies on a feature called 2-2 Pulldown Detection, which is more difficult to achieve than the 3-2 Pulldown Detection required for NTSC.

The HD-E1's results in this area were curiously mixed. I managed to get some PAL movies to play problem-free without changing any settings, whereas others, such as live action films like Panic Room and Hannibal (Superbit) would look disappointingly jagged, as would animated films like Mulan, resulting in a look that was only slightly better than connecting a DVD player to an LCD TV through an Interlaced-only connection such as SCART or S-Video. Others would play correctly if I forced Film Mode on in the Picture menu, whereas others simply wouldn't look right on any setting. Changing the resolution made no difference to this problem (except in the case of changing the output mode to 480i/576i, which transferred the deinterlacing duties over to my TV, which also has the 2-2 Pulldown Detection problem - meaning that I got to see slightly different-looking jaggies instead of the HD DVD player's.)

A lot of cheaper Progressive Scan DVD Players suffer from similar problems. The only ones I know of that routinely don't are the ones based on Faroudja chipsets, like most of the players from Oppo Digital. Presumably, the combined cost of the advanced video codec decoding circuitry and the HD DVD drive itself meant that working a more capable Standard-Def-improving chip into the player's design would have pushed costs too high. It's still an improvement over the American HD-A1, though, as that couldn't play PAL discs at all.

The price point for this HD DVD player makes this relatively understandable, but unless your current DVD player also has this problem (a lot of them do), then I would recommend getting an HD-E1 and using it only for HD disc playback, keeping two players around.

SD Playback: NTSC and PAL video camera material

Video camera material is tricky, because there's no way of exactly recombining the video fields into a completely clear image. This means that some degree of jagginess will always be visible when there's movement in the image (or sometimes even if there's not).

Some players employ line-smoothing technology to minimise this effect. Using the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark Disc, I confirmed that this entry-level player does not appear to employ any smoothing, which was in line with my expectations.

Usability & Responsiveness

Responsiveness is an area in which the HD-E1 really shines compared to the first HD DVD players. Remote control commands are acted upon nice and quickly, and in addition, the unit takes 46 seconds to power on and start producing video from an HD DVD disc. I need to stress that this doesn't feel nearly as long "in real life" and that the numbers make it sound like a bigger deal than it really is.

Stopping a standard-def disc gave me the option to resume it from where I left off, but unfortunately there's no such feature for HD DVDs yet. Some discs make use of HD DVD's Interactive system to allow the user to place Bookmarks (simply by pressing "B" on the remote control), which means that this annoyance can be lessened - but this requires you to watch the Copyright warning and Startup logos again, and is only currently used by some studios' discs.

Sound

The lower-end HD-E1 lacks the Analogue Surround audio outputs that are necessary for current sound setups to make the most of next-gen audio formats. But, this doesn't mean that it can't produce spectacular sound. Although my focus is mainly on video, I must point out that many HD DVD discs sound noticeably superior than their DVD counterparts, even on lower-end setups. The sci-fi space battles in Serenity are just one example of the excellent audio capabilities provided by this format.

The player's Setup menu offers a small selection of audio adjustments. There's options to change what type of audio signal goes out over the SPDIF and HDMI connections (PCM or Bitstream), as well as Dynamic Range Control and "Dialogue Enhancement" features. I left any modifications off for the purpose of this review.

Conclusion

It's a shame that the early rumours (I need to stress that word: rumours) of Toshiba incorporating a Faroudja-based video chip into these players to handle SD DVD playback turned out not to be true, because although that solution would introduce a few of its own side-effects, it would do a much better job of motion from Standard-def DVD and smooth jagged lines from Video Camera content.

Nevertheless, this is an HD DVD player, and although most content is predominantly still in SD, it'd be unfair to knock it too much for doing an average job of SD playback - especially when you consider the player's price and how excellent HD DVDs look on it. (Additionally, it doesn't seem possible to remove the SD DVD region restrictions from this player, which means that not everyone would have viewed it as a replacement for their existing DVD player anyway). The SD DVD playback is flawed, but then again, so is the SD playback of many SD-only players!

The most obvious competitor to the HD-E1 will probably end up being the Blu-ray playing Playstation 3, which is due to launch in Europe in just over two weeks. If the European version of the PS3 eventually upscales both PAL and NTSC DVDs and does as good a job of it as the Japanese unit we reviewed does with its non-upscaled NTSC playback, then it may just take some of the shine away from the HD-E1.

If you have an HDTV, you really, really should have some form of HD movie source to go with it. It's true that the future of both of the HD disc formats is up in the air, but for a great price, the HD-E1 provides you access to an excellent catalogue of films that more often than not feature top-notch video compression with almost no visible artefacts - an area in which the Blu-ray format is still playing catch-up in - on discs that you get to keep, unlike an HD movie channel. When you consider that an HDTV decoder and subscription to an HD TV service would cost you far more than this for only one year, it's a little difficult to justify any criticism of this machine's price. Given that the HD-E1 produces near-perfect HD DVD pictures, it's an imperfect device that I still definitely recommend thanks to its value.