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 August 18th 2008 1:33AM
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....