I broke down a few weeks ago and picked up the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player when Amazon was giving away Heroes Season 1 for free with the drive. As with any HD-DVD player right now, you also get 5 free movies by mail - hopefully those will come sometime in the next few months.Anyway, the quality was fairly impressive to me - I watch lots of network TV in HD and you can really tell the difference when watching on an HD-DVD versus a broadcast encoded with MPEG-2. Makes sense since the bit rates are much higher and VC-1 encoding is used rather than old school MPEG-2.

The whole thing ended up costing me a lot more than I bargained for though - I ended up taking back my old Vizio HDTV due to some buzzing problemswith the speakers and the backlight and got a new onewith 108op. Then I realized the new TV didn’t accept 1080p via component and traded in my old Xbox 360 premium (sans HD) for a new falcon Xbox 360 Arcade with HDMI. Popped on my old HD and I was good to go. I do miss the chrome though… hopefully the new falcon 360 will be a little insurance against future RROD incidents in the future, but even the falcon is not immune.