Kodak’s Theatre HD Leads in YouTube Quality

Of all the set-top boxes we've seen stream YouTube to the TV, Kodak's seems to do the best job masking the shoddy source quality.

Though there are more options now than ever when it comes to playing YouTube on TV, the fundamental lack of image quality when you plaster highly compressed Web video across an enormous flat panel screen still seems to be one of the biggest barriers to actually buying one. After watching Netgear’s $200 Internet TV player in person, I appreciated the convenience of accessing Web content from couch, but still couldn’t get past the painfully bad image quality. Kodak’s $300 turned me around, though, and at the moment I think it might just be the cleanest and most convenient way to bring YouTube off computer monitors.

According to Kodak reps, the company uses the same image filtering technology used in its cameras to take YouTube’s muddied masses of pixels and turn them into something appropriate for that 42-inch plasma in your living room. It doesn’t work miracles, but every video I pulled up on screen looked significantly better than the mix I was able to access on Netgear’s box. The Wii-style motion remote is another major high point in the interface, which makes it very easy and intuitive to find what you want on the box without the typical arrow mashing through lists.

Granted, there are some caveats. The Home Theatre HD won’t do video sites outside YouTube like Netgear’s cheaper Internet TV player will, and unlike Netgear’s Digital Entertainer Elite, which is only $100 more, it doesn’t support full 1080p high-def (only 720p) and has no internal storage. Still, for quality and ease of use alone, Kodak seems, from the show floor at least, to take the cake.