Toshiba to Release Uber DVD Player to Fight Blu-ray
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: Toshiba, Blu, ray, XDE, HDDVD | Themes: Digital Entertainment
Toshiba today announced its "near HD" DVD player, which effectively succeeds the company’s HD DVD players that were removed from the market earlier this year.
Rather than concede to complete defeat by embracing Blu-ray Disc – the competing format against Toshiba’s now dead HD DVD – the company is working on ways to enhance current DVD software. All Blu-ray Disc, HD DVD and most DVD and players available today “upconvert” a standard DVD’s 480 lines of resolution that is scaled appropriately for an HDTV. The result is a picture that is slightly better suited to the display, though it still cannot compare to a natively high-definition source.
CEO of Toshiba Corporation Atsutoshi Nishida said in an interview shortly after the fall of HD DVD that the company developing a player that would give existing DVD’s a leap in quality.
“If you watch standard DVDs on our players, the images are of very high quality because they include an "upconverting" feature. And we’re going to improve this even more, so that consumers won’t be able to tell the difference from HD DVD images,” Nishida said to the Wall Street Journal. “The players would be much cheaper than Blu-ray players too. Next-generation DVD players are in a much weaker position than when standard DVD players were first introduced.”
Toshiba’s first next-generation upconverter player – dubbed the XDE series – will debut later this month, with the XD-E500.
The XDE is for “eXtended Detail Enhancement,” which the company claims is more than just DVD upconversion. The technology will offer user selectable picture enhancement modes that allow for “greater detail, more vivid colors and stronger contrast that bring standard DVD quality closer to the HD experience,” so the company said.
“Consumers have embraced the DVD format like no other technology and invested in large libraries of their favorite movies. As the market moves towards high definition, XDE lets them experience their existing DVD library and the tens of thousands of DVD titles in a whole new way,” said Louis Masses, Director of Product Planning. “XDE offers consumers a simple solution to add on to their HDTV purchase. XDE works with existing DVDs to deliver a near HD experience with enhanced detail and richer colors. Toshiba is delivering to consumers what they want – a high quality experience at an affordable price.”
These enhancements include a "sharp mode" to improve the visualization of details. Toshiba says that "XDE technology analyzes the entire picture and adds edge enhancement precisely where it’s needed." Then there is a color mode that makes "the colors of nature stand out with improved richness," as well as a contrast mode that is designed "to make darker scenes or foregrounds more clearly visible without the typical washing out that can occur with traditional contrast adjustment."
Unfortunately, home theatre aficionados know that similar “enhancement” technologies that are often a part of televisions or DVD players do little but to add undesirable artifacts to the picture. Regardless of enhancements, Blu-ray Discs (and HD DVDs) deliver six times the resolution of a regular DVD. No amount of clever processing can create truly meaningful information where there is none.
With a price of $150, this new XDE player is more expensive than Toshiba’s entry-level HD DVD players at their time of cancellation, about twice as expensive as typical 1080p upconverting DVD players and half as expensive as entry-level Blu-ray players. Unlike other Blu-ray or HD DVD machines, the XD-E500 has DivX certification, JPEG capability, MP3 and WMA playback.
If the XD-E500 is as good as Toshiba claims (and those with massive DVD collections hope), the device could buy undecided HD buyers more time until they switch to cheaper Blu-ray players or devices that entirely rely on Internet movie streaming.
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pretty cool actually this more likely to take off then blue ray just because blue ray costs so much more and so many people already have dvds
This is really very good news for pleople like me that have a bunch of DVD movies. to hell whith BD I'm not going to spend another fortune on their hardware and their $40 titles.
The best thing would be to have movie titles with BD on one side and DVD on the other. This was already happening with HD-DVD titles. Before the format war ended, Sony said they could also do BD/DVD combo discs, but I haven't heard anything about it since then.
Has anyone heard anything about this?
..What about storage space? You can't have high quality without high amounts of data.
Concearning the Dual disc format:I doubt it will happen with Blu Ray on a Large scale because Sony owns the Blu ray format and Toshiba the DVD format so the movie studios would have to pay royalties to Sony and Toshiba for 1 BD. The reason it happened with Toshiba's HDDVD is they owned both formats HDDVD and DVD and were trying to promote HDDVD so I doubt there was an extra charge to the studios. Don't get me wrong I would be in favor of a Dual disc but just don't see it happening in the near future$$.
i hope they release a pc version of these drives
Toshiba could care less either way. Sure they lost a ton of money
But they also onlike 51% of Samsung Drive Divison. They new from
the beginning that blu-ray would probably win considering they
new everything there was to know about it from Samsung a major
blu-ray (partner.)
DVD still reigns king, and Toshiba is still making a killing off
of each dvd sold, and this actually will help a ton.
Considering that one of the main reasons to go Blu-Ray besides the resolution is the actual Disc Content, all the special menus and
stuff. Well that pretty much was a flop almost nobody cares
about special features, let alone cool see through interactive
menu's. Lol sony and panasonic, and samsung should have known
that its only a small market of people who actually care about those
things.
1600P 2560x1600 tv's will be coming shortly, and all this 1080p True
HD crap is going to piss alot of people off when they realize
that 1080p is only temporary, and people all ready have monitors
on the market that can do 4 times the resolution of 1080p
Actually Westinghouse has had monitors over 1080p for atleast 2 years now, but they are only used for specific things, like
topography, and very high resolution 3D images.
Just wait till people realize that there is more HD resolutions out
there.
I've just invested in three 400-disc Sony DVD changers ($280 each) so that I can get instant access to my 1000+ movie collection. I won't be throwing those out any time soon, and if I ever upgrade it will be for a 400-disc BD changer, once they come out.
I'm not an early adopter but there's only a certain limit to where you can push regular DVD. I'm happy that the DVD changers I have let me access my entire collection, give me progressive scan, HDMI 1.3 and upconvert to 1080i/720p. I paid half the price of a 4TB HTPC, and I don't have to deal with hard drives, disc ripping or Windows.
Wow, it's hard to believe this is a technology forum with all these bizarre and inaccurate statements. Has anyone here actually seen a BD movie? Some of these statements are the equivalent of longing for the days of directx 7! Time to get off your borrowed computers and head back to your caves.
Well, this is not the fabled Super Upconversion player, you will have to wait until next year for the Super Upconverting(960p native) + XDE post-processing DVD player.
In the mean time, you can be the first one to experience Toshiba's Super Upconversion(960p native via computational fusion of 9 SD frames) if you have $3000 to afford their high-end REGZA Super Upconverting HDTV sets launching this fall.
Garbage. Some of you people are on something. You can upconvert all you want, it's still not going to be the real deal and for anyone that says you can't really tell a diff between Blu-Ray and Upconvert is either blind, doesn't own a HD TV that supports 1080p or is stupid.
steelcity took the words out of my mouth.
this is just a marketing gimmick.
Upconverting WORKS !!!! It is just that the upscalers have been very very very, expensive. A good upscaler would have set you back around US$5000.00. Most people only know the cheap upscalers, a really good upscaler work fantastic. Question is, will the Toshiba upscaling DVD player work as well as my external unit ? Do you know what SDI is, if not, then you are not really qualified to comment here !!!
Well good upscaler is better than bad... ok with that, but you can not add information that is not in there, so real HD is always better alternative. But for those who has a lot of DVD's this can be reasonable alternative as an second player with Blue ray...
this isn't meant to complete against blu-ray, the headline is slightly sensationalistic. from a different interview:
Louis Masses, director of product planning for the audio and video group at Toshiba America Consumer Products, was careful to stress that it's not meant to compete with or replace Blu-ray. ?If you want Blu-ray, go get Blu-ray. This product is meant to improve playback of DVDs," Masses said.
blu-ray crock of BS. I bought into HD-DVD because i dont believe in what blu-ray wants ( to completely control the content of what they are selling, at a higher profit margin, and make it un-copyable ). My HD-DVD movies still look fantastic but my 100+ dvd's sure could use an upgrade, but the problem lies with MOST PEOPLE ALREADY HAVE A DVD PLAYER. I wont go rushing out for this with my 360 dvd player + HD-DVD player already in my living room.
Considering my HDTV was purchased just before that dammed HDCP protection was introduced, I'll buy one of these players.
The last thing I need is to buy a Blu-ray player then have it down convert my resolution because my TV isn't HDCP compliant. Oh, its a Sony HDTV too, that's what you get for being an early adopter.
Home Theater Magazine just reviewed this Toshiba player and basically said that it was comparible to most other upconverting players at the $150 price point, and it made no sense at all with Blu-ray players now avaialble from $230.00.
Still, we get the idiots who say "$40 for a title" when I have about 30 titles which I paid about $15 each for - mostly from Amazon.
This product causes ringing and forces detail enhancement (sharpness) which does not help, but hurts image quality. This is no Realta chip, or any other solid product.
Just a marketing gimmick for a desperate company trying to protect their DVD royalty stream. I can respect that, but not the fools who stupidly follow Toshiba because of their love affair with HD DVD.