Since the player can be connected to a network with an always-on-broadband connection, it can easily receive firmware updates from the Internet. After manually setting up the IP and Gateway addresses (the auto-detect didn’t work), I was up and running and downloading the latest updates. This process took 30 minutes, and obviously the player must remain switched on during this process. After the download is complete, the player reboots hopefully with the upgraded firmware.
I tried the same batch of films that initially gave me problems, and they were all fine. In fact as I write this, I’ve tried 13 films in a row, without any issues at all. Kudos to Toshiba for providing updates to resolve potential read problems with movies. "What about those without an Internet connection?" I hear you ask. If you haven’t an Internet connection (and why not?!), you can register with Toshiba themselves, and they will send you update discs whenever new firmware is released. These discs are placed into the machine and contain all the data needed to upgrade the firmware, which is done automatically.
The player itself is nippy enough when navigating HD-DVD film menus, and didn’t give me the slightly sluggish feel that the 360 HD-DVD player did, as the latter was a software based player. I have seen quite a few reviews citing long start-up times so I was happy to report that the player starts up in exactly 30 seconds with the latest v2.2 firmware. I admit that 30 seconds in itself is rather long when you compare that to a modern DVD player, however the difference between the two on a hardware scale is rather large, although the public won’t realise this so Toshiba will have to work on quicker start up times for their future players.
Another oddity was the player’s setup menu. It cannot be accessed whilst a movie is playing, for reasons which are unknown to me at the moment. It’s highly annoying having to stop a film, just to make a couple of tweaks here and there, and then having re-start the film and resume where you left off. This doesn’t bother me much as I am hardly going to return to that setup screen once I’ve got my correct settings figured out, however perfectionists who enjoy tweaking around won’t be so pleased.
Lastly, I want to mention how good normal DVD’s look. The HD-E1 will upscale your Standard Definition 576i DVD’s to either 780p or 1080i, and in all honesty they look really good, and I do mean that. Put it this way, the good DVD’s with good transfers look superb, whilst the poorer transfers exhibit noticeable artifacts resulting from the upscaling algorithms. On the whole it isn’t too bad, so using this device as a HD-DVD/DVD hybrid player will be more than happy.