My wife Kathleen spent yesterday afternoon at our friend Jen Colangelo's house watching The Chronicles of Narnia on Jen's big, new plasma television. When she got home, Kathleen said the movie (which was played on a progressive-scan DVD player) looked "amazing" compared to movies on our old, analog, 480i TV.

All a progressive-scan DVD player does is transmit images in 480p, the so-called EDTV format, instead of 480i. This is a huge advance in picture quality, which becomes more obvious as the size of the monitor increases. That's why DVDs look so good on HDTV sets.

A new generation of DVD players with higher resolution than 480p is on its way. There are actually two competing standards: HD DVD and Blu-Ray. Both will offer the ability to project images to an HDTV at 720p or 1080i depending on the format that the producers chose for the movie. The questions for many home theater fans is, at what point do I upgrade to a more advanced DVD player, and which format should I choose?

Martin O'Donnell pointed out a syndicated article from The Los Angeles Times by David Colker where he reviewed the first HD DVD players from Toshiba and came away less impressed than he expected. Colker said, "unless you already have a high-definition television at least 40 inches in size, you won't notice much of a difference."

His recommendation to people who have not yet bought the HDTV set of their dreams is to invest the $500 that a first-generation HD DVD unit would cost in a bigger HDTV monitor. "In the time it takes to save up another $500, the price of HD disc players will probably drop and a pending format war may well be decided."

The article includes some surprising revelations:

• HDTV sets without HDMI component interfaces may not be able to display HD DVD movies at anything above 480i resolution.
• Smaller HDTV sets with HDMI don't benefit from HD DVD as much as you'd expect because the difference in resolution is a lot less obvious on small monitors.

The article barely mentions the fact that HD DVD and Blu-Ray movies are virtually impossible to get at the moment. Thankfully, HD DVD and Blu-Ray players are backward-compatible with standard DVDs, so if you did decide to spring for the new technology, you could replace the standard DVD player in the component stack.

Technorati Tags: home theater, HD DVD, Blu-Ray, HDTV, EDTV.