Hurray! Now Toshiba's will have banding too.

Ben, nice review, but I would take issue with your consistent recommendation of "ALL HD players are good upconverters". In particular, the Toshiba A20, A30 and A35 are NOT good upconverting players if you are trying to output at 1080p/60 instead of 1080i/60 or 1080p/24... which most people will likely set the player to thinking it "matches their TV". Feel free to read more about it at this thread:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=918262

Basically, they don't perform the inverse telecine process properly, and end up not passing the full resolution at any progressive output other than 1080p/24. The XA2 works fine since it's using the HQV for everything instead. With the three mentioned though, it's best to use it at 1080i for upconverted DVDs and let your display handle the deinterlacing/scaling... otherwise you aren't getting a real progressive image with these. This only applies to SD content obviously, but it does bear making note of that these really aren't very good upconverting players (except for the XA2).

I'm not sure why the reviewer only mentions the 5080 as the alternative Kuro to the Elite model reviewed. The 5010 (full 1080p version of the 5080) can be had for 3500 from plasmaconcepts.com.

Just as an FYI to JET:

The XBox360 HD-DVD player DOES output 1080p via the VGA connection. It is limited to 1080i over component due to a stupid limitation forced by the HD-DVD format ('no 1080p over component'), but it is not because of the a limitation in the 360 itself. I've seen 1080p via VGA at a friend's house for the HD-DVD, and it looks great.

Beyond that, I run 1080p myself via component for all other aspects of the 360. Okay, it's not HDMI... but so what. On a 52" 1080p set from 10 feet away, you CANNOT tell the difference between 1080p over component vs HDMI.

Is the MP3 download link working for anyone?

Maybe it's just me, or that the photo is poor, but is it really better to have 20,000:1 contrast as opposed to SHADOW DETAIL? I mean, just look at that comparison... the amount of detail in the right hand "brighter" shot that doesn't show in the left hand shot is simply staggering.