Oh Toshiba, has it really come to this? After a humiliating loss to Blu-ray, Tosh just unveiled its new $150 XD-E500 DVD player. It's no run o' the mill DVD player mind you, this unit touts Toshiba's new eXtended Detail Enhancement (XDE) technology -- that
super-duper resolution
upconverting tech meant to fill the void between ubiquitous upconverting players and Blu-ray. Unfortunately, the player demonstrated offered just "subtle but noticeable sharpening of the image" when compared side-by-side (in a controlled demonstration) with an unnamed $70 upscaler -- to its credit, Tosh did not try to compare its new player with an HD-capable Blu-ray machine. Still, more than twice the price for "subtle" hardly sounds like a compelling purchase to us.
Update: Official
press release is now out which, oddly enough, helped us upconvert our 480i/p cynicism to full-blown 1080p/24fps skepticism.
posted Aug 18th 2008 1:33AM
Nice price too.
good job.
Nice over-sharpening too. No need increase the level of detail for consumers: just over-egg the existing sharpening algorithm and then sell it to consumers who'll incorrectly assume a sharper image has more detail. The more we piss on consumers, the cleaner they'll think they're getting.
Hmm no mention of SpursEngine in the press release. Samples of the chip were selling for $100 and presumably they're at least $50 in production at the moment. I wonder if this DVD player even contains one and if so what the profit margin is. And if it doesn't, I wonder what *is* in the player. Maybe all it's doing is regular interpolated upscaling with some glorified edge enhancement / colour saturation / gamma correction slapped on top.
Badass.
Die Blu-ray, die!
ohh, i see you made a typo. you meant to type HD-DVD
btw
/joke
Hmm, yes, I too dislike HD content with high bitrates and great audio quality.
[/sarcasm]
When the hell are those losers gonna man up and accept defeat?
I figured if i invested a great deal of money and time in a format and lost. I wouldn't be too happy paying the competitor royalties either. I think they would continue to improve DVD upscaling quality and hope for the best with downloadable content. Also made a bet with a friend that when the opposing competitor make a player of the opponent's format, loser would buy dinner. So far so good that Toshiba and Microsoft haven't made a Blu Ray player.
Boo hoo. There's happy and then there's profit. Corporations are in it for the profit.
Sony does not own Blu-ray, if Toshiba were to go Blu-ray they would not be paying royalties to Sony...
@juxtah
now, he said pay royalties to the competitor, which is absolutely right. whether it's sony, BDA, or whatever, toshiba still has to pony up pretty pennies.
@Juxtah
Not to start a fight, but you're mislead if you think BDA owns Blu-ray, Sony was the first licencing company for Blu-ray technology and logos back in 2001/02, they still control all these patents and trade marks today, they just let another company handle the paper work for them now through BDA. Yes there are 3 companies that hold patent and rights to Blu-ray technologies, but Sony holds the majority of them.
To hell with this upconverting nonsense. Give me a DVD player with H.264/AVC decoding + usb port.
PS3?
Oh... did you hear?
It does bluray too!
You know, the person or persons that write this crap for Engadget can get a little decency. Toshiba was the clearly better platform and the company was on the side of the customer, for crying out loud. Sony is on the side of the movie industry and their machine is only about making more money for them by making the customer need more than the HD-DVD format did. Toshiba is on record speaking how they wouldn't follow suit with the pressures to get on board with the movie industry and all involved with making the HD format costly for the consumer.
Try to have a little knowledge, will you? You're biting the ones who were on your side...unless you, too, are getting kickbacks from the whole mess.
I can only thing of one way to reply to a comment like this.
LOL!
What are you talking about? Toshiba wasn't on the consumer's side, they were on their own side. Toshiba was in it for the money.
BluRay costs more because companies are trying to make money selling it. I know this may seem annoying, but the alternative is the format dying, as happened with HD-DVD.
No company was able to compete with Toshiba's prices on HD-DVD players because Toshiba was selling them at a huge loss, hoping to make it up on sales of HD-DVD movies. Since no other company got a significant amount of royalties from disc sales, that left Toshiba as the only significant player in the HD-DVD market. Unless you count the $1,000 LG players.
HD-DVD was a go it alone format, like Betamax. It reached the normal fate of go it alone formats, as Betamax eventually did.
The only really amazing part of HD-DVD is that they managed to convince a group of people that somehow Toshiba was "pro consumer" and not just in it for the money.
I agree that HD-DVD was a fine standard. BluRay 1.0 is fine too. I have no need for video overlay nor internet connectivity. I am greatly disappointed that competition from HD-DVD caused BluRay to have to add a lot more hardware to the spec (for dual decode) that most customers will rarely use. It adds a lot to the price and doesn't really add much to the movie experience. If I want to play games or get internet connectivity, I'll use a computer or console. I want my disc player to play movies in HD.
Some people need to move on. Blu-ray was clearly the much better technology, and thankfully it won out.
I wonder why Toshiba don't want to do a side by side with proper HD??? LOL
So Blu-ray with the larger capacity and faster read speeds didn't deserve to win? Blu-ray was the better platform technologically, and as if Toshiba were out for the consumer they were out for themselves like any self respecting corporation would be.
Juxtah, Blu-Ray was a better platform, but not by much, and the price difference at the time HD-DVD was still alive didn't justify going Blu-Ray for those slightly higher capabilities. Not only that, HD-DVD had all the movie features of Blu-Ray (not movies, but the features inside them) that Blu-Ray is still trying to get with 2.0.
HD-DVD was not a bad platform, and when you really get down to it, was a better platform for everyone considering the price. It's too bad HD-DVD died (though I have not purchased a player from either platform)...
Toshiba even managed to screw over their OEM partners Alco (Venturer) and Onkyo with their predatory pricing. Imagine slashing the price of the A3 so low that even an A3 clone can't compete with it. I can understand why Toshiba did it in their desperation to win the war, and then eventually to clear their bloated inventory. Even so its clear why most CEs ran a mile from the format.
As a side note Alco's 2007/2008 financial statement says they will be producing a Blu Ray player. Expect to see a Venturer BD player at some point in the next 12 months. Who knows, maybe Alco & Toshiba kissed and made up and this is the first clue that a Toshiba player is in the works too.
Juxtah, Blu-Ray was a better platform, but not by much, and the price difference at the time HD-DVD was still alive didn't justify going Blu-Ray for those slightly higher capabilities. Not only that, HD-DVD had all the movie features of Blu-Ray (not movies, but the features inside them) that Blu-Ray is still trying to get with 2.0.
HD-DVD was not a bad platform, and when you really get down to it, was a better platform for everyone considering the price. It's too bad HD-DVD died (though I have not purchased a player from either platform)...
Not by much but it was better, and HD-DVD players were just as ridiculously expensive as Blu-ray players were when it was still alive, the only price advantage to HD-DVD was lower costs changing production lines to make them, apart from that I think that competition between companies making only blu-ray will drive prices down much more then HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray could have.
And I think HD-DVD's death is good, it means competition between blu-ray devices can start which drives prices down and settles us on a unified physical format. The price difference was so small it's pretty much irrelevant, and when it comes down to it I'd much rather pay 5% more to get a platform that is about 10% better, considering firmware upgrades, extra capacity, faster read speeds etc.
You know, ranting about something dead isn't gonna make it come back alive. move on with your life, will ya?
What good is all the so called good points of BluRay if it is LOADED with DRM and garbage like that? That was the only edge HD-DVD had, it wasn't catering to the *AAs by adding crap the consumer doesn't want
You can't put back what's not there. You can guess but at best all that's it's gonna be is an (semi-educated) guess
I have an upscaling DVD player, swapped for my fubar'd old SD DVD so it probably isn't the best but still when I play a DVD it looks like a DVD.
My dad bought a philips upconverting DVD player. I hooked it up to my LCD TV, watched it. Then, I set my PS3 to output 480p and let the TV upscale it, and watched it. Then, I set my PS3 back to 1080p so it did the upscaling and watched it on the TV. We agreed that just letting the TV (samsung LNT4071f) upscale the content ended up looking better than the upconverter. There is no magical algorithm to restore missing details. This is like selling a photoshop knockoff and saying it can let you remove parts of the foreground to show you the original background.
I like how they've capitalized the X, as to firmly establish that this product is not merely 'tended,' but eXtended! Hooray!
This just seems like an unnecessary step to me, I dunno.
It's not eXtended, it's eXTREEEEEEEEEME.
Ah, I can't blame them for being bitter and stubborn, after all the backstabbing, lying, and back door deals Sony made, bribing the studios with incredibly invasive DRM that they later dropped for example, I'd be bitter and stubborn too.
I suggest you go look up the $150m deal Toshiba/HD-DVD did to get Paramount exclusivity.
Both sides threw money at movie studios and offered underhanded deals, it just happened that Sony had more money to throw out than Toshiba did.
Rantrev, does the doctrine of unclean hands mean anything to you? I fully expect the chairman of Sony rang up the chairman of WB / Fox etc. and promised certain things, as I'm sure the chairman of Toshiba did likewise. I am also sure that Sony, Microsoft & Toshiba would sell their top deal brokers into discussions with all major studios and CEs to persuade them to join their camp. Why do you expect otherwise? I don't know why you might choose to rail against one camp and not the other. We certainly know for example that Toshiba & Microsoft paid money for Dreamworks & Paramount exclusivity so you're hardly in the best position to complain if you're sore at Sony for winning.
I'd like to know how this compares with an Oppo DV-981HD and DV-983 HD, respectively.
The format war is over. Blue-ray is king. period.
Now, let's put that aside and let's discuss up-converting technology (as that discission is orthogonal to HD formats - that is, there is merit in up-converting older DVD libraries to newer, blue-ray compatible, display technology. Can we agree on that?).
So, going back to 'Andy Anonymous' question: How does this Toshiba compare to the Oppo?
(Perhaps it's too early to ask?) Has anyone actually tried the Toshiba?
Thanks,
HookEm
Not a chance, I know how Sony is, I've seen and read the reports. This is about Sony making money for the other interests involved as well as itself off of the consumer. Next you'll say it's okay to charge the consumer whatever they want.
The reason Toshiba's format failed was because the movie houses stopped supporting it because Toshiba did not want to add all of the screwy copyright crap to their format like Sony was more than willing to prostitute on. The movie industry wants ALL of your money and you are supporting it. Toshiba tried to be on the consumer's side and got screwed by the movie industry.
HD DVD died for many reasons.
It lost studio support, because it did not enforce region coding.
It had a cracked DRM format.
Whilt you may think both of the above were great advantages, ultimately they mean jacksh1t if your movie stuidios dump you because of them.
HD-DVD has plenty of DRM on it (AACS, HDCP). There's no room to try to pretend it is any more pro-consumer than BluRay in this way.
I like movies and i'm willing to pay for it. I don't know what's your problem.
Toshiba Get over it HD is Dead Blu Ray is the way to go stop being a bunch of gready sore losers.
These so called HD enthusiests will continue to cut off their nose to spite their face for many years to come. Kinda proves how un-HD they were, when they make pathetic little personal protests like this..
People pay double for "subtle" difference all the time. In electronics there is a subtle difference between my Klipsch F-3 ($425 ea.) speakers and a friend's MartinLogan electrostatic ($1300 ea) speakers. But they were worth the money to my friend. There is a suble difference between my Onkyo 875 and my older Onkyo 605, but the almost double price was worth it. In LCD TVs, you can pay $1000s more for a "subtle" difference between a high end Sony and a Philips.
With food, there is a "subtle" difference between store brand and name-brands, with the name-brands usually costing twice as much - and usually the store brand is the name brand but with a different label.
Porsche, BMW, Ferrari, Lambo, etc. often offer packages for thousands (or $10,000s) more, when all they do is add 5-10 extra horsepower. Sport packages on these cars can cost thousands, when all they do is tighten the suspension and drop the car a couple millimeters.
Even with Blu-ray, the Denon costs $2000, while the PS3 starts at $400, but why are you not mocking the Denon, which offers "subtle" increases in AV quality?
And here, with this DVD player, people may find the extra cost for a "subtle" increase in PQ worth the value. But because it competes (and not even that, this is like comparing the Apple TV to a Tivo or Media Center - Apple TV does not even offer DVR functionality) with your favorite format of the day, it must be derided. And why are you not laughing at all the Blu-ray players? the cheapest one is almost 3X more expensive, and to those who do not have a HD TV, a Blu-ray player offers no better increase in PQ.
if you think the difference is subtle between your F3s and the ML speakers your friend has you are sadly mistaken... I have the Klipsch RF-35s and they put your speakers to shame, and the MLs put my 35s to shame.... your other examples were okay, but the 605 to the 875 is another one that is poorly thought out.
I think it's more likely a licence issue...
Maybe Sony demand so much money from others, so that they can sell more PS3.
Kit, seriously Sony do not own Blu-ray they simply developed the format. So people building blu-ray devices do not pay royalties to Sony. I believe the Blu-ray disc association owns the format, Sony does not!
@Colin:
I will concede that point only because my hearing is not as good as it used to be, so to some it may be a big difference, but to me it is not. Which kind of proves the point, to one person a subtle difference may not be worth as much to some people. The difference was not worth it to me being I cannot hear the difference.
I say bring on a VHS upscaler! Screw this Blu-Ray nonsense!
[/joke]
wtf! how did the end of your comment get into the beginning of mine??
No way this upconverts better than my HD-DVD player.
HD-DVD was an undoubtedly better, well thought-out, and finalized format. Boo hoo. It's over. Don't make this "the good guy vs. the bad guy," it's ridiculous to believe that any corporation is really in it "for the consumer." Toshiba wanted to make money like everyone else. Underselling players wasn't enough to escape Blu-ray's marketing muscle. You can, however, take comfort in the fact that Blu Ray will probably not take off like Sony'd hoped and will remain a niche product, if that's any consolation. Toshiba either needs to bite the bullet if they wanna make some of that money they lost back and make nice and produce a BD player. They'd make a damn good BD player too, judging by the quality of their HD DVD players. Or they can sit in their corner and stay mad while most of the other major electronics manufacturers are getting a piece of the pie with their repsective BD decks.
I don't understand how HD-DVD could possibly be called a better format. Yes it was finalized, avoiding version number crap like we have now with Blu-ray, but the features that it added on were ones we never really needed.
Better technology points go to blu-ray for the 50gb in 2 layers, as well as the ability to play back higher bitrates. If you own Transformers on HD-DVD you'll see why a higher capacity disc was an advantage, as the movie was not able to support HD audio (or lossless for that matter)
Toshiba conducted their own demo, choosing their own material and the other player to compare it to. And journalists witnessed "subtle" improvements. Why do I think this is not the miracle tech that some were hoping for? You can't miracle HD out of an SD source. All they can do is interpolate and then use inter-frame differences of slow moving areas to add minor emphasis. In the best of circumstances you may get better edge definition but I think in many DVDs where the quality is poor or the action is too quick, the tech would fall back on interpolation more often than not.
Toshiba need to get in the Blu Ray game and add XDE as a feature and selling point. Trying to sell a $150 player in a market of < $70 players is not going to work.
Toshiba is trying to appeal to several markets simultaneously, all of which are current DVD owners.
Don't forget, many BD owners still have a lot of DVDs, and there's a lot of easily-played DVD owners with money and huge collections that'll buy any piece of technology that will supposedly make their shit shine brighter.
I'm first to admit I have a LOT of bootleg crap. If I like a movie, I'll rent it or borrow it in a better format to see it again. If I LOVE a movie, I'll gladly buy it on DVD if it's cheap, or BD if it's a worthwhile purchasable product (GOOD TRANSFER, GOOD SOUND, IS IT SO DAMN HARD TO ASK WHEN I'M PAYING $30?).
In the meantime while I wait for my fave movies to come out HD On Demand or BD, (or HD-DivX, tee hee), my purchased (and copied, and downloaded) DVDs are going in the best upconvertor in the house. I'm not plopping down for another player, though.
I have a nice upscaling DVD player in the sub $100 range from about a year ago.
I still use it, because it's MARGINALLY better than my newer PS3 at upscaling DVDs.
Hmm... sound reasonable?
A stand alone product that delivers as good or better results than a more expensive product created by your competitor...
sounds like a worthwhile marketing endeavor if you play your cards right.
Couple that with a bunch of "new processing modes", and you've got a great snake oil.
I swear my TV has all those "modes" in it already, so did half of the DVD players I've ever owned.
It's like Sega's "Blast Processing" all over again.
Actually, it reminds me of those old (way before Pro Logic II) 5.1 systems that weren't really 5.1.
You'd connect a stereo source, and the center speaker was like the reverse of a karaoke machine (brought out the "center" audio instead of eliminating it), while the back speakers had either delay or reverb of the front stereo speakers' signals.
A buddy of mine had one in college, boy did I get a laugh out of that. No matter how many times I tried to tell him that you can't get Dolby 5.1 from a DVD player through the RCA jacks, he wouldn't listen.
In other words, Toshiba's really saying, "we're trying to tide you over while you adapt to the inevitable future technologies. How hard you hold onto the past or enjoy it in the future means the amount of faith you have in what we can bring you."
I wanna see one of these things in action on a good system and judge myself, but I'm highly skeptical. It's like blowing up a photo saved as a highly compressed .jpg and saying your printer will fix it for you.
Even the best Photoshop skills can't just "fill in" missing data.
This can mean only one thing...
Toshiba is still in the first phase of the stages of grief (which would be denial).
Wake me up when they get to the anger part.
i think this is the anger part. why else would you release a high priced dvd player instead of a next generation disc player? rebellious in nature, i think
Cool! This is good for the people that haven't bought into Blu-Ray yet like me. I won't be trading in my oppo for it but good to see that their is still interest in plain old dvd's.
@Juxtah
"Not by much but it was better, and HD-DVD players were just as ridiculously expensive as Blu-ray players were when it was still alive, the only price advantage to HD-DVD was lower costs changing production lines to make them, apart from that I think that competition between companies making only blu-ray will drive prices down much more then HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray could have."
You should go check Blu-ray player sales on this one, only 10% of the players sold are set top units, most Blu-ray player sales are the PS3, many people are buying them as such now, and an ever increasing number are now computer bay units. Out of the set top units a very small percentage is being sold by companies other than Sony, the units aren't going to drop in price if nobody is making a profit other than Sony.
"And I think HD-DVD's death is good, it means competition between blu-ray devices can start which drives prices down and settles us on a unified physical format. The price difference was so small it's pretty much irrelevant, and when it comes down to it I'd much rather pay 5% more to get a platform that is about 10% better, considering firmware upgrades, extra capacity, faster read speeds etc."
Blu-ray a better platform?
200?, Developers determined that the disc was prone to scratching, fixed first by a caddy then by adding an extra layer onto the disc.
May 2006, launched incomplete.
2006, BD-J found to be unstable, requires several updates to fix, still is unstable because of the programing method.
2007, BD+ used, locks up and out machines which haven't been properly updated or had proper updates made avalible.
Sep/Oct 2007, announced that two advanced forms which were planned to be supported from the start but not finished would be launched later in '07 and '08, 1.1 and 2.0, were given names to make early adopters feel better, only player out that supported the formats was Sony's PS3.
These in themselves make the format worse, the format is inundated with DRMs controlled by BDA and its manufacturers (not the movie industry), and requires long hard coded materials to even work. Add the shear cost to the format you're looking at a format that just doesn't make it worth the upgrade from DVD to HD, most people don't need HD or even care about HD. You're also placing money on a format that is stuck in the past, 1080p is on it's way down, the HD ladder has had a new step added supporting 2160p, and Blu-ray cannot support the resolution without a complete retooling and reformatting of the format, neither could HD DVD for that matter, but Toshiba's interests never laid in the HD disc format if you want to know the truth, they were looking for a way to extend the life of DVD until networks, SSD, and Flash devices got large enough, powerful enough, and cheap enough to become feasible as a digital media carrier device, and HD DVD was just experimentation for said formats. There are tons of other ways of getting video to the TV now and all of them support HD now, discs are dying.
Nomatter what you do you can not make 480 lines of resolution look like 1080. Interpolation can only guess at what data is missing from the data that is actually there. In the case of 480 there is not enough actual data to ever match a true 1080 frame capture.
If interpolation was really that good I could take a 72 DPI web image and blow it up to poster size and have it look just like a 300DPI print ready image. Sorry it just doesn't happen.
Come on, upscaling barely looks any better to begin with this is a waste of time and money. Blu-ray is currently the highest quality picture and sound for movies there is. My PS3 does gaming, Blu-ray, DVD up converting, web browsing, and Divx/multimedia streaming so it's nice to have it all. And Transformers comes out September 2nd :-)
I think very shortly MSFT is going to have to respond to the reality that the PS3 is by far a more more advanced console.
The PS3, especially if your looking between the two today, is by far the better value.
$400 get you:
a next gen console,
40GB soon to 80GB HD
a fully functional BD player, not to mention the best
built-in wireless hardware
DLNA networking for streaming media
Free account to the PSN
There are different grades of upscaling, and the better players absolutely do make a difference. Compare an Oppo DV-983HD next to one of the $70 players and you'll see what I mean.
I just want to know how this Tosh player compares to those nicer ones.
Oh, and CaW, the PS3 is missing one important part of that equation: a better game library. Without that, I don't think Microsoft has to "respond" to anything.
Andy Anonymous,
You are just looking at the current market. The 360 may have a larger library, but how many of those titles are quality titles?
Again you have to look down the road. Developers are already complaining the 360 is being hindered by the DVD storage space.
On the PS3, that storage space is going to be less of an issue. Same thing with the 360's hard drive. Most units out there are 20GBs, which further limits installing games on the HD.
I am not a huge gamer, but I like quality games and I am not dissapointed with the PS3 library.
CaW,
I'm talking about quality, not size, of game library. The 360 has had a very impressive number of these, including Gears of War, Lost Odyssey, Dead Rising, Ninja Gaiden II, and Halo 3; it had some exclusives last year that are finally coming late to the PS3, like BioShock and Eternal Sonata; and it's got some great stuff coming up such as Too Human, Fable II, and of course Gears of War 2. Plus, it's shared most of the good titles the PS3 has had, like GTAIV, Rock Band, Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, The Orange Box, and Burnout Paradise.
The PS3 on the other hand has been fairly slow to get quality exclusives. Uncharted and MGS4 were really the first PS3 exclusives that could be called "great"; the rest have been either fair to mediocre, or have also been on the 360.
Your point is well taken that the future holds more and better for the PS3, but the same can be said for the 360. For now and for the forseeable future, the 360 has the superior game library by a fairly wide margin. If you're looking for a Blu-ray player anyway, the PS3 is a value that's hard to beat. But if you're not, it's hard to recommend over the competition.
Don't pretend like HD DVD was perfect out of the gate because it was not.
1. The first players were clunkers running Linux.
2. Just like BD, some movies required FW updates to playback properly (although with only Toshiba making units it was more transparent)
3. Units were bricked during FW updates
4. The combo discs DVD/HD-DVD were a disaster plus they usually cost more than their BD counterpart. (remember the old boiling trick)
5. HD-DVD was an underdog from the beginning. Even when Paramount dropped BD, they still only had 3 major studios in their court.
6. The so-called $99 price was a one-day firesale of HD-A2s and some states with anti-dumping laws like WI did not get the price.
7. The HD-DVD group was always trying to spin their numbers by factoring the PS3 in and out when it helped their "argument" against BD. Sorry don't treat the public like morons.
8. The 360 add-on was never a true answer to the PS3. Every PS3 was a fully functioning BD player. Even if it was not used out of the gate every PS3 sold has the potential to be a regularly used BD player.
9. Giving away 7 to 10 discs away per player smacks of desperation.
10. HD-DVD was hacked early in its lifecycle. This did not help them in their effort to get support from Disney and Fox.
I am so sick and tired of fanboys trying to make it look like HD-DVD was given the raw deal. Face it. The better technology won.
It's no secret here that the editors of Engadget had a vested interest in seeing HD DVD win. Heck, I even saw their sad eyes on G4 CES 08 coverage after the Warner Brothers announcement started the kill switch on the format.
There is an excellent upscaler for photoshop which can do dramatic scaling: http://www.alienskin.com/blowup/blowup_examples.aspx
Much better than bicubic interpolation. I wonder if this player uses the same method?
It's another DVD player, end of story. It's not any better of an upconverter than any other upconverting player out there. This player just represents more "sour grapes" from Toshiba.
Think about it. You and I read Engadget; we're pretty familiar with what's going on in technology; we know how the format war ended.
Your average person is still wondering what the difference is between "plasma and HD". Yes, I've been asked this recently. I'm sure you've been asked by a loved one something similar along these lines.
So now, thanks to Toshiba's sour grapes, they're leaving the same crowd wondering if they need a new DVD player, a Blu-ray, or... an XDE player? Great.
My goodness, can you imagine how confusing it must be to be like the other 90% of the population that has no idea what they're doing when it comes to home theatre and technology in general? This industry isn't exactly helping itself to win over those who haven't already upgraded their equipment. And yet, if it could be spelled out in terms (and visuals and audio) they can understand, I would imagine that all kinds of folks would be up for an HD experience upgrade to see what their new TV can do. They're just so unsure of what, and who, to put their faith in. Stuff like this doesn't help.
A bunch of sore loser posting here.
No not the HD DUD bargain basement hoarders, it's the Blu-ray fans who are irritated to be reminded that they are not the big dog. Piss on the big dog's porch and find out what happens next. This is a Chihuahua nipping at the heels of a Pit Bull. Ya got bit, shake it off and don't cry about it. Nothing worse than a yipping Chihuahua.
Since the hive mind has issued the attack order this player, this product actually intrigues me more. There must be a real creditable threat from this product to blu-ray right?
DVD is the biggest and best selling entertainment product in the world, and will be for years, so any company offering a player with superior dvd 1080p processing makes good business sense. After all that's why all Bly-ray players offer dvd playback and enhancement.
The AP said "subtle but noticeable sharpening of the image", a lot of fan boys including (apparently) the vato who posted this biased report here cling bitterly to the "subtle" part of the AP report. This is room of reporters who probably couldn't tell the difference in DVD to blu-ray, and if they did the difference would be "subtle".
Reported as fact is that there is a noticeable difference over upconversion. Humm maybe it was compared with the wal-mart special, either way this player does a better job than what is currently available.Got to be worth a look at that.
Comparing it to blu-ray is folly, Toshiba didn't try it. Everyone else int he media is connecting the two, which is what toshiba wanted. Thanks to the blu-biased reports half the people reading these reports are now convinced this player is close to the same quality as blu.
This is a mistake, but in a world where most people believe that dvd is good enough this makes dvd seem even better and more appealing.
Go buy a ps3 and skip this player. What? This has to be in jest. Indeed it must be since there is a $350 dollar price difference (retail) and a great price difference when it considered that this player is already showing up for under $130. With blu-ray consumer needs to be convinced to not only buy a more expensively player but that they must also repurchase their movie collections again and be willing to pay the higher cost for new releases, all on a format that the majority believes is only "slightly" better than DVD.
PS3 fanboys if you are in earnest then please get together and start a fund to help average people buy PS3s. Put your money where your mouths are.
Finally forget about Blu-ray this is about DVD, and must be judged and talked about accordingly. Compared only with other DVD players.
Linking it to blu is exactly what Toshiba wants you to do. Because when the average reader sees a reports like the APs they are not going to separate them, all they are going to take away is "this player makes my movie collection look like blu-ray, and that is supposed to be good right"
Oh, Toshiba will make a blu-player the day after the PS3 isn't sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. Which from the way things look will not be for awhile.
A new manufacture would have to be nuts to venture in the Blu player market right now. Once things get settled down a bit and cost come down, profiles get set into stone and studios are producing better quality BRs, then it might make sense to compete with the PS3. Unless of course the PS3 take a price cut next year and it might.
So in short, this is a standard DVD player, with a massively cut down Cell chip inside, and some smart software algorythm..
How many week before the much more capable PS3 Cell can do exactly the same thing, but better??? Not long I would think... The PS3 upscaling quality is already very high.
I would like to see this tested against a properly setup PS3 for DVD upscaling...
It's a sad state when you purchase in good faith from Toshiba a HD DVD player just a little over a year ago only to have it obsolete now. I have talked to Toshiba about a money back for what I bought deal.....no luck there..Then I talked to Circuit City where it was purchased and they too say no luck here.....I hope there is a Class Action Suit against Toshiba for selling something with a three year warranty when after a year it is not worth a Tinker's Dam....