The “Break it Down” Blog

It’s official, the Microsoft XBox 360 HD-DVD addon will be available in November for $199. For a limited time it will include both a HD-DVD copy of King Kong and the XBox 360 Universal Remote. It wasn’t clear from the announcement (a) just how limited-time the bundle was, (b) if the control was also limited time or (c) the price will be effected in any way after the limited time is up.

I want to issue a strong reminder to anyone reading this and saying “Oh god that’s so much cheaper than the Toshiba HD-DVD player, what a great deal!”: all media players are not created equal. Just because a device players a certain type of media does not mean the quality is the same across the board, there is a huge amount of processing involved with rendering something as simple as a piece of DVD media to your screen, a $40 DVD player from Walmart, a XBox/360 and a $1000 Denon DVD player are all going to have extremely different results in picture quality all with the same DVD disc. I would also point out that the PS2, XBox and XBox 360 have all had horrible DVD players in them, naturally they are capable to play the media and if you are watching the disk on a 27″ CRT you most likely will never notice it, but if you put these devices on a high quality display and start playing back the same movie, you’ll be able to see the difference.

So I agree this is a value for folks that have smaller/older TVs or folks that just don’t really care. But for people out there spending $5k on a television that they want to look the absolute best, do yourself a favor and don’t make this your HD-DVD solution.