I’ve been poking around the net for information on the various Toshiba models for a few weeks now, but didn’t save any links. I’d suggest you start by poking around avsforum.com. There is an HD-DVD subforum, you can also go searching. As you might expect, you’ll find all kinds of conflicting posts; what I extracted was that the HD-A30/A35 was superior to the A3 in scaling; however, the A3 scaler is still quite good.

OK, went away for awhile, so I see there’s been some followup. From what I’ve read, there have been some firmware fixes, also, while upscaling interlaced video to 1080p@60 Hz is supposed to have some problems currently, the IVTC is supposed to be good and the 1080p@24 Hz is supposed to be very good (that’s presupposing you have an HD monitor that supports that format…)

DVD specified output is 60i, but the encoding of frames on the disc can be progressive with flags to tell the decoder to repeat particular fields to produce 60i. Progressive DVD players will do some combination of paying attention to the designed output frames and looking at the repeat field flags to decide how to produce progressive video (unfortunately, many DVDs in the past had some oddities with the various frame/field flags so a DVD player couldn’t just look at those flags and be done with it, instead, they’re treated as hints)

The interlaced player will display 60 half frames a second, yielding 30 full frames a second. The progressive play waits until it has both fields, but is still displaying 30 full frames a second.

Are they? I was under the impression they were 480i; TVs are, after all, 525i (at least in the US). A quick googling (as well as too much time spent fiddling with the innards of mpeg2dec) leads me to believe that the DVD itself is 480i and 480p players paste the two halves of an i frame together to make a p frame.

If anything I think it tells me to wait - the A3 is going to sell out before March, but people might balk at the A30. So if I wait, I might be able to get the A30 for even lower.