HD DVD and Blu-ray look the same. In fact there are more examples of compression artifacts on Blu-ray (meaning, macroblocking and whatnot, not master defects like EE/DNR) than HD DVD due to Blu-ray releasing more artifact-prone MPEG2 titles for quite some times.
To answer your question, I would have to say that the upconversion quality of HD DVD players is unmatched. I had one, and I miss it. The BD30 Blu-ray player I had for a while before I returned it looked like utter crap in comparison.
And, you will be able to enjoy discs cheap... HOWEVER... in time those discs may become a liability. HD DVD player manufacturing has completely stopped and the Samsung BD5500 combo was cancelled. New HD DVD players are getting harder to find. At some point that supply may dry up and if your HD DVD player breaks you may be stuck with an expensive repair or an eBay hunt to find a replacement player.
On the other hand, for $99 it does offer incredible output quality. My only criticisms would be that the Toshiba players are slow to boot and my personal reliability track record with them has not been the greatest.
#1: HD-A1 - Bought new, partial failure within 6 months (sporadic skipping, freezes), got free repair that did not fix the problem, got a 2nd free repair, eventually sold unit on ebay
#2: HD-A2 - Bought new, disc read errors right out of the box even on SD DVDs. Returned to Best Buy for a replacement. Replacement has worked perfectly ever since. Still have this one, which has been the most reliable of my standalone HD DVD players.
#3: HD-A35 - Bought new, complete failure in less than 3 months (constant lockups & unresponsiveness). Sold on eBay (after Warner announcement) brand new HD-A35 replacement Toshiba sent me since they could not repair the unit.
So I guess I'm 1 for 3 - or 1 for 4 - depending on how you look at it in terms of HD DVD players that did not break within a relatively short period of time. Why did I keep buying them? Again, as I posted originally the output quality is simply fantastic and nothing in the pricerange matched them at the time - in terms of SD DVD upconversion there is still no BD players that matches them under $500.
Your call, I guess
