Regardless of which horse you bet on, the past few weeks of home theater headlines have been painful (if not predictable) at best. Ironically, now that HD DVD has gasped it’s final breath, it might actually be a good time to pick up one of these players for a next-to-nothing price.

What would possess a sane consumer to spend money on a technological paperweight, you ask? Well, spare parts for one. Although Toshiba is promising to support existing players, I wouldn’t count on a plethora of pieces for too long. Another scenario could be the offensively high entry price of Blu-ray. Sure, the picture is awesome, but $500 is still a lot of cake to us working folk. Lastly, the HD DVD upconverting magic. If you’re in the market for a standard player, why not buy HD and let it bless your standard discs.

Which brings us to Toshiba’s HD-A2. Circuit City (and no doubt Toshiba) has got to be losing money on this deal, but let’s not lose any sleep. While the A2 isn’t the flagship of the HD DVD line (far from) it has enough features to please the cheap hearted. Bonus: buy it before Feb. 28 and you’ll be eligible for five free HD-DVD movies (after a rebate).

Quick specs:
- Plays CD, DVD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, HD DVD, DVD-R DL, HD DVD-R
- Built-in Dolby Digital, Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS, and DTS HD
- Advanced high-performance 32-bit SHARC Digital Signal Processing
- DVD upconversion via HDMI Video Upconversion - 720p/1080i

Sale price: $85.89

Deal ends: while they last

Buy now: www.circuitcity.com