Toshiba's XD-E500 upconverting DVD player caught in stores

We'll apologize on our tipster's behalf for the quality of this shot, but evidently, he wasn't able to pass it through Toshiba's completely mind-boggling XDE upscaling technology before forwarding it onto us. Anyway, we reckon you can get the point -- the XD-E500 upconverting DVD player is filtering into stores, so those looking to make their current DVD collection look its best should probably take notice. Or not, whatever.

[Thanks, Philip]

[img eL @ Sep 13th 2008 11:29PM]

Busted!!

[B.Cherry @ Sep 14th 2008 1:59AM]

Man, forget BluRay! Yeah it might be the best video format out right now, but its useless to me; meanin', I can't take advantage of it like DVD. How many of you actually have a BluRay burner? If so, HD quality movies to burn (20GB+ per movie)? Okay, I thought so! Heck, I can see if we were actaully able to download 50Mbs+ off the internet. I have Charter 10Mbs and the most I reached was 1,324Kbs from one website (RealityKings.com). I sure wish that was from bit torrent. I don't even know with enthernet cables have 10/100/1000Mb capability when every damn website have "Bandwidth" limites probably under 1MBs. Anyways, DVD's can be copy and burned in under 30 minutes. Its called the "RRR" aka Rent Rip & Return. Simple as that! I do hop Toshiba one day perfect the up scalin' so I can save myself a nice penny. Between gas and tryin' to keep up with the latest gadgets, I'm taped out...

[Andreas @ Sep 14th 2008 6:24AM]

There are many different technologies for upscaling. The ones Photoshop uses is decent for photos, but it doesn't try to enhance the quality. Images go pretty blurry, it doesn't magically provide any sharpness to upscaled images.
However smarter algorithms analyze the image data and take high contrast areas such as edges and textures and during the upscale give them a high resolution treat. Instead of a blurry upscale they look sharper. But hey... doesn't every blu-ray player out there do this to standard definition content anyway? And even the HDTV's out there do this already, right? Or do they generally just upscale without any enhancements? Perhaps the Toshiba algorithms really are magic :)

[JerseyBricklayer @ Sep 13th 2008 11:33PM]

lol

[Ignatius @ Sep 13th 2008 11:37PM]

It's been at my local Circuit City for almost a month and a half now...

[uShak @ Sep 14th 2008 12:46AM]

Month and a half is a bit of an exageration

BUT it has been in my Best Buy for about 2 weeks now.

[Wildarms7000 @ Sep 14th 2008 9:08PM]

He's actually not exaggerating, I work at Circuit City and when it came in about a month and a half ago I had to test it for myself to see what kind of tom foolery they were trying to pull.

Verdict is: It's ok.

[Ignatius @ Sep 14th 2008 10:59PM]

Bhahaha, bury my comment under your low ranks, even though I am right. Lawl, I work at Circuit City, I'm the one who put it on the shelf.

[Matthew @ Sep 13th 2008 11:38PM]

blu-ray still looks better

[Eli @ Sep 14th 2008 12:28AM]

Yes. Yes you do.

[Colin Potter @ Sep 14th 2008 12:28AM]

or... ya know... save the $150 from this player, buy a $200 Blu-ray player for christmas, use it as an upscaler for all the movies you own and only buy movies you dont already own on blu-ray

[Michael Scrip @ Sep 14th 2008 12:50AM]

Or, you can just rent Blu-Ray discs!

Seriously... you don't have to OWN every movie you want to see. When you go to a movie theater... you can't walk out with the reels!

[Ignatius @ Sep 14th 2008 11:00PM]

Only $2 more on Netflix for Blu-ray rentals.

[why not the LS2LS7? @ Sep 15th 2008 3:30AM]

I pay $0 extra for BluRay rentals on Netflix.

[raptor @ Sep 13th 2008 11:42PM]

How embarrassing. This too will burn in flames just like HD-DVD. $150 for a DVD upscaler? Toshiba, swallow your pride and start pumping out $150 Blu-ray players. Stop doing your shareholders a dis-service by acting like an upset little punk.

[Spyvie @ Sep 14th 2008 12:26AM]

Sony is Satan

[matthew @ Sep 14th 2008 12:41AM]

I just played Stairway To Heaven backwards and I think I did hear Sony in there a couple of times.

[HemanC @ Sep 14th 2008 12:45AM]

You should see the $400 DV-983H from Oppo.

[brad @ Sep 13th 2008 11:56PM]

so is this basically an HD DVD player repackaged? cause i remember reading stories about after their HD players demise they were touting it as this awesome upconverting player instead... sad attempt at clearing old stock if you ask me..

[Colin Potter @ Sep 14th 2008 12:11AM]

I actually sold one as a CD player.

[Mike @ Sep 13th 2008 11:58PM]

NOTE TO TOSHIBA

GIVE IT UP BLU RAY WON YOU LOST GET OVER IT

[Spyvie @ Sep 14th 2008 12:27AM]

No

[Colin Potter @ Sep 14th 2008 12:12AM]

I was totally gonna be the tipster to get this story because we got them at my work on wednesday but they weren't on the shelf til today... but someone stole my thunder.... engadget, feel free to email me if you want a less blurry picture

[DarCowAlways @ Sep 14th 2008 12:22AM]

Love the name!

XD

[UnnDunn @ Sep 14th 2008 12:24AM]

It doesn't carry the magical Blu-Ray logo!!!

BURN IT WITH FIRE!!!

[Matt B @ Sep 14th 2008 12:28AM]

looks, like the photo coulda used a bit of upconverting-- HAR HAR *ducks*

[Alex Padilla @ Sep 14th 2008 12:38AM]

I lol-ed

[Micanos @ Sep 14th 2008 12:45AM]

I didn't...

[Wwhat @ Sep 14th 2008 9:24AM]

Joke was already made (better) in the text underneath the photo.
"We'll apologize on our tipster's behalf for the quality of this shot, but evidently, he wasn't able to pass it through Toshiba's completely mind-boggling XDE upscaling technology before forwarding it onto us."

[kamikaZi @ Sep 14th 2008 12:30AM]

I work in retail in an AVS department and we got these 'wonderful' devices in on Tuesday. I set one up a few days ago with the 3 second demo mode turned on ( switches between colour, contrast, and sharpness advantages through a 3 second on/off loop) and my first response was 'yuck.' Up close it is pretty ugly, very pixelated, and at some times looks worse with the enhancements turned on. As I was doing work through out the day and standing from a distance of 6 or so feet, I noticed it actually did look abit better from a distance. So the XDE works...if you sit back. The further away, the better! If you are someone who watches their movies from a close distance, stay FAR away.

[HB96st @ Sep 14th 2008 12:37AM]

I want one.

[uShak @ Sep 14th 2008 12:50AM]

A month an a half is a bit of an exaggeration

BUT it has been at my Best Buy for almost 2 weeks now.

Matter of fact I usually see a lot of things before they end up at engadget (i.e. Microsoft arch mouse)

maybe i should start being a 'source' (:

[animeGhost @ Sep 17th 2008 12:23AM]

no it actually has been at circuit city for like a month and a half

[raptor @ Sep 14th 2008 1:04AM]

Hey, Toshiba - There's no replacement for displacement, you knuckleheads.

[why not the LS2LS7? @ Sep 14th 2008 1:34AM]

VTEC just kicked in yo.

[Artie Lange @ Sep 14th 2008 1:45AM]

Hey raptor,

Suck it.

Your friend,

-Toshiba.

[jmatson11 @ Sep 14th 2008 1:39AM]

i work at a best buy and we have had these on the shelves for like 2 or 3 weeks. nobody cares about it though, when you could just buy a blu-ray player anyway

[Ironhide @ Sep 14th 2008 2:26AM]

It's sad that people can't come to grips with the fact that Toshiba took a both in risking everything on a new format. How many companies kept trying to push their broke down format for years after? Mini Disc? Beta? At least Toshiba has the good grace to try and stick with tech it has that it can try and recover some of the dump trucks of money they lost on the format war.

That being said the XD-E500 is not a bad investment if you do want a decent upconverter. I had the pleasure of seeing it side by side with a plain vanilla upconverter and there was a rather obvious difference to me. Is it BluRay quality? No, but it makes your regular dvds look pretty damn nice on that 1080p tv you just sunk money into.

[Flowah @ Sep 14th 2008 3:30PM]

Minidiscs retain a small audience of hobbyist and professional recorders who enjoy the high quality recording format and removable media. It found a niche. What niche does Beta fill? Or $150 upconverters when Blu-Ray players also upconvert and are not that much more for a cheap player.

[why not the LS2LS7? @ Sep 14th 2008 3:22AM]

MiniDisc succeeded in Europe and Japan until the iPod came along and washed it away. It had a good over 10 year run in those markets.

I don't get your "come to grips" comment. Toshiba may have taken a bath on their go-it-alone HD-DVD format, but that's no reason not to go with BluRay now. If they really felt HD disc was a market to be in, why are they avoiding it now? It appears to just be pure spite, and spite rarely does any good.

[eiki @ Sep 14th 2008 7:27PM]

flowah: well, digi beta is used on pretty much every tv program made in the UK

[eiki @ Sep 14th 2008 7:30PM]

floqah: well digibeta is used in making just about every tv program made in the UK, and proabbaly a good proportion of the world

[Travis @ Sep 14th 2008 2:46AM]

Would people stop comparing up-converting DVD players to Blu-ray?
Up-converting doesn't magically turn your low-quality DVDs into Blu-Ray quality movies.
All it does is turn crap into slightly better looking crap. That is all.

Up-converting does make a big difference for me. Of course it might have to do with having an Oppo Player, i'm not sure. I played back a movie on an old Philips player and then the Oppo and the difference is huge. This is on a 46" Sony though through DVI/HDMI.

The money is better spent on an Oppo player with a good chipset.

[bidmead @ Sep 14th 2008 3:57AM]

There's a lot of misunderstanding about this, mostly cultivated by manufacturers trying to sell TVs into a saturated market.

The difference you see between HD and SD isn't about resolution. At a typical viewing distance (where the screen subtends an angle of about 30 degrees on the viewer) the human eye can't resolve 1080 lines. The UK's 576 lines are good enough; NTSC at 480 is not too bad either. Visible jaggies on diagonals start to become apparent below this figure.

The crispness of HD is chiefly a function of bandwidth. DVD MPEG2 is doing 10Mbps max, normally around half that. HD MPEG2 gets around 20Mbps. Less compression, many fewer compression artifacts. This is the main reason that SD closeups generally look fine, but long shots (with a lot more detail) get blurry. Once again: this is nothing to do with resolution.

Anything that upscales SD to HD can't fix the compression problems. And in any case, if you feed an SD signal into an HD display, some component somewhere in the chain is going to be doing upscaling anyway. Those intermediate lines are going to appear whether you've got an upscaling DVD player or not, because no way is your HD display going to show a small 576 line picture on its big 1080 screen. And it's not going to interpolate blank lines either. So the display will be faking these intermediate lines for you.

But there is an advantage in getting something like the Tosh DVD player to do the interpolation. If you're feeding RGB from your SD device into your 1080 display, the display is having to work in the analogue domain to do the interpolation. The upscaling Tosh on the other hand does its magic in the digital domain, which will give you a better picture even if you use RGB to get to your display, and an even better one if you go out through HDMI (pitiful though the design of that interface is).

I was at a TDK demo of the wonderousness of BluRay last week. The demo room was designed so that (and I'm not kidding) you had to sit about a foot away from the screen. They showed us split screen: SD and HD of the same movie. The HD looked great; the SD was crap. Even so, it was clear from mosquitoes and other edge artifacts that what we were mostly comparing was bandwidth.

--
Chris

[Donce @ Sep 14th 2008 12:11PM]

if display is getting its native resolution from device - it will not have to process the signal in any way. This why we use external scalers. And of course everything depends on scaler. Toshiba say they got it.

[exthuse @ Sep 14th 2008 6:00AM]

Is that X the DivX 'X'?

[John @ Sep 14th 2008 8:57AM]

Dear Toshiba, please work with microsoft to add this technology the the Xbox 360. Shouldn't be that hard to do a software solution with the power the 360 has. This could take it from one of the lower quality dvd players to one of the best.

[DssTrainer @ Sep 14th 2008 11:49AM]

Wow... another run-of-the-mill upconverting DVD Player....

How is this news?!?

[mikejonas @ Sep 14th 2008 12:33PM]

It's not "run-of-the-mill"; it basically juices up the upscaled video with additional sharpness and noise reduction, contrast and saturation. It's DVD on steroids. I've owned a number of upconverting players, last of which was an Oppo, and no matter how much better one model would upconvert than the other, they still looked like upconverted DVDs--soft, lacking in color depth and contrast range. I picked up an XDE from Amazon the moment it was out, just to see what it did.

kamikaZi is right on with his assessment; when you're up close trying to look for the magical results (as one is wont to do with Blu-Ray), it is jarringly disappointing--even horrid--to look at. But when you're at the proper viewing distance, you notice that it *is* doing something. It's probably a videophile purist's nightmare with all the electronic enhancements they put on the DVD signal, but for a Joe Schmo, I'd say it would make watching more enjoyable.

[been11 @ Sep 14th 2008 1:06PM]

i saw one at best buy last week. no big deal.