Cons of the Xbox 360 HD DVD Add-on Drive
May 7, 2007
By John

It all started back when I graduated college. I really needed a replacement for my ancient 27" RCA console TV. Now don't get me wrong, I liked having my ancient TV around just for nostalgia's sake alone, but I really needed an upgrade. So I had been drooling over HDTVs for the past year and a half, and I found some pretty good ones. The best one that I found was the Sharp AQUOIS 42" 1080p LCD HDTV. Now when I found it, it was way out of my price range, but since then I had been doing some saving and some bargain hunting. I really wanted an LCD HDTV, and I came across an ad for the store HHGregg, which mentioned their latest one-day-sale. Basically, if you bought anything expensive enough and signed up for an HHGregg credit card, you could get 2 years of interest-free financing on that purchase. So I went there expecting to get a $500 720p 32" generic LCD HDTV. However, they had sold out of those. Just for fun, I asked how much the 42" 1080p Sharp was that day, since they were having a storewide sale. To make a long story not quite as long, it was several hundred dollars cheaper than it had ever been, and I bought it that night.

Now, I love this TV. I absolutely love it. However, I have had one major problem with it. After I bought it, I went out to Gamestop and got an HD-DVD add-on drive for my Xbox 360. I did this because I thought that this way I could get an HD DVD player and an up-scaling DVD player all for $200 without needing any additional cables. A lot of video-philes don't like up-scaling DVD players, but I personally like them, as they make my massive DVD collection look great on my TV.

After my recent experience, I wouldn't recommend getting an HD-DVD add-on drive. For one thing, unless you recently purchased an Xbox 360 Elite, you don't have an HDMI output. Also, if you are like me and you don't have a VGA input on your TV, you don't have the up-scaling feature of the drive either. The biggest downside to all of this is that when your 360 breaks down on you, and you see the 3 Red Lights of Death, then you have neither the 360's great games with awesome graphics nor your HD-DVDs! With the stand-alone players now being sold for $350, which includes 5 free HD-DVDs, the 360 add-on drive really turned out to not be as good as it once was.