Check thi story from www.1up.com


" Toshiba began selling the HD-XA1 for 110,000 yen (roughly $936 USD) in Japan today, says the IDG News Service, marking the release of the first HD-DVD player anywhere in the world. The technology isn' t planned to start appearing in US stores until sometime next month.

A bonus to early adaptors is a lack of region lock-out, meaning visual aficionados with deep pockets can import a player from Japan and not worry about their US-bought HD-DVDs playing properly on the machine.

Of course, having anything to play on the machine might be a problem considering even Japan won' t receive HD-DVD content until next week, but at least we' ll start hearing of some hands-on reports to let us know if HD-DVD is worth the plunge before Microsoft releases their add-on for Xbox 360 later this year."

OH and some great news here : http://gear.ign.com/articles/698/698656p1.aspx