Toshiba's BDX2000 Blu-ray deck hits Best Buy for $199, sour grapes also on sale
By Nilay Patel 
posted Oct 26th 2009 8:22PM
posted Oct 26th 2009 8:22PM
[Thanks, Alex]
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People still bother with physical media? Just adorable. Brings a tear to the eye, really.
if only they could stream dolby true hd 1080p seamlessly
physical media is superior in every way
Come back in 2 years when fiber is more widespread.
Give it 2 more years or so.
Everyone said that CDs sound better than MP3s and yet look at what happened.
Never, i repeat NEVER bet against the laziness of an average American. We will do anything to make our lives easier, we will accept a slightly lower quality for convenience.
Dear Engadget,
Can you please stop being a arshole and not make fun of Tosh? They lost the format war this time and to survive as a company they have to pursue in directions that are helpful in helping them make their investors happy. If you continue making fun of them, i'll stop visiting your blog. Tosh warriors (lawyers) will bring you down if you continue making unfunny jokes about them.
Kthxbye.
- NOT a Tosh fan.
P.S. I own a Nokia fone, use a samsung monitor, have an HP notebook, run a linksys router, use creative speakers, an a4tech hf a razor mouse and a4tech keyboard.
P.P.S. I like engadget
P.P.P.S. I'm having my breakfast now, and i hate my Life&Living class.
Well, you can't lend to (or borrow from) friends, the DRM can make it hard to work on the device you want, If you have the bandwidth to support it they won't and you'll pay for it in bitrate, no extras, often no subtitles, and there are few bargains on old titles like you'll find rooting around a store.
While Blu-Ray is massive, DVD's cheap and both quite copyable, the positives of film files is outweighed by the roadblocks, I think.
I will use physical media for as long as possible. I admit downloading and streaming may be more convenient, but i prefer quality over convenience. That actually actually getting something physical for the money I pay.
@ milkywayer
P. S. S. S. You are full of B. S. S ..... Not stop making such lame jokes as that may really make people to avoid this fantastic blog.
Lol people still think downloading is going to over take physical media. Heard this over 15 years ago when i first got my internet connection and still hear it to this day. Try and get SACD audio quality on a download and try doing the same with blu-ray.
The news about Toshiba are interesting, not so much the fact that the sour grapes are on sale - really, Nilay, no one would buy them but you, let alone eating them and writing that awful post as a consequence.
@tikiteko,
I'd feel happy if my comments can make people like you (who enjoy seeing someone making fun of someone/something by mockery), you clearly have no respect for other people if you come outta nowhere and start calling someone 'they are full of BSS'. I hope you don't behave like this in real life, caz i'd beat the living shit outta you if you said so to me in person.
P.S. I can bash Engadget in anyway i want since Its one of my fav blogs for years now and i feel a connection /w them.
Toshiba won the war in my eyes. It's the consumers who lost.
Toshiba had a cheaper product that offered the same picture and audio quality. Not to mention finalized standards.
Both download content and disk media has positive and negatives. Download for rentals when it is inconvienient or too late to go to the closest B&M store, disk for movies that you like and watch over and over.
But really, this is just a big, multi-billion dollar game of rock-paper-scissors.
Apple hates BRD because they have iTunes movies.
MS hates BRD because it has netflix.
Sony hates downloads because it has BRD.
Of course, Apple fans hate BRD until rumors of BR drives start circulating.
MS fans hate BR until rumors of BR drives on XBOX start circulating.
Sony fans hate downloads, until rumors (and a weak patch to get downloads on BR/PS3 devices) of Netflix start circulating.
@Sea Urchin
I don't think it is fair to isolate this just to Americans... The CD is showing great lasting power in any other country either.
If the Blu-ray player is as good as the HD-DVD players they made I might get one!
I've actually been waiting to get a blu-ray player when Toshiba released one. I've owned many Toshiba DVD players and all of them still work today.
RIP HD DVDs
how, does anyone actually have an HD DVD drive anymore?
@Blake: What were the people who spent so much on them supposed to do with them? "Oh hey there won't be any new movies in this format, so I better throw it away."?
People either sold them to people who wanted to buy them cheaply so they could cheaply play the movies that were released in high def, or they still have them lying around to play those movies they already bought.
DVD came out how many years ago now and people still have VCRs around to play their tapes.
Toshiba should've realised it didn't have a powerful computing product that was going to sell millions and sit in peoples living rooms, and promptly jumped ship.
I assume your talking about ps3 but I think you will find the blueray-hddvd war was determined by deals made with distributers such as WB not because of hardware.
Toshiba also developed hd-dvd and a captain goes down with his ship.
It might be noted that during the HD format war more stand alone units were sold for HD DVD vs Blu-ray, if it wasn't for Sony Trojan Horsing Blu-ray into the PS3 and then having no decent game support for the system Blu-ray would have had very bad sales.
That's because HD DVD was for consumers
Blu Ray is for Sony and the Studios
lol, i like the title of this article.
The only thing great about HD-DVD was its compatibility: the ability for one side to be DVD and the other HD. Beyond that, and the menu system, they did not have a compelling "killer-ap" to drive the customers their way. The PS3 was the killer-ap for Blu-ray.
Though, I'm glad I purchased the LG dual-mode HD-DVD/BD player just when Circuit City imploded - I still have my HD-DVD collection (all 11 of them!) and can play my newer BD discs (all 11 of them!).
I'm glad they swallowed their pride and joined the party - more products mean more competitive pricing/feature pressures.
Oh come on, Blu-Ray isn't even finished yet. Did you ever have to worry about updating a DVD player because they brought out some stupid new feature that no-one needs? DVD and HD DVD just worked. HD DVD was the better format.
Dear Engadget:
Who cares about blu-ray?
Sony money has almost totally ran dry, so you can stop shilling now.
I like blu-ray.
@MikeM
All of your past comments seem to suggest you are strongly pro-HD DVD.
Don't you think its time to, y'know, forget the past - isn't that what Toshiba wants in this product?
Dear MikeM,
People who have blu-ray players cares about blu-ray.
Sincerely yours,
-PS3 owner who loves blu-ray too.
lol at the butthurt
I certainly don't care about blu-ray, but it's not because I care about HD-DVD, it's because I simply don't care about the quality increase. It's far easier just to get it over the internet (legally), and not waste the money paying for outrageously expensive blu-ray disks. If downloading something is the issue, seriously, plan ahead, if you internet connection is all that terrible, start loading the movie before you plan on watching it, it's not hard.
$200?
Might as well spend $100 and get a PS3, at least you can get games for that as well.
What a waste of money.
I'm pretty sick of that argument. Guess what? People still bought dedicated DVD players when you could have bought a PS2 or an XBOX to play DVDs for only $50 or $100 more.
Not everyone wants to pay that extra $100 to play games they never wanted to play.
Oh, and your avatar looks like you're taking a big one up your behind.
No thanks, I'd rather have a dedicated blu ray player that costs me less and does everything I'm looking for
Besides, those that want a ps3 for a blu ray player already own one. The market blu ray now needs to cater to is the older market, and they dont want a PS3
Ah yes the old buy a dedicated Bluray not a PS3 because its cheaper excuse, one small problem is dedicated players cant update when standards change were the PS3 can thanks to that little thing on the back called a LAN port.
My Blueray player has an ethernet connection??
@Richard
I think nearly every bluray player has a LAN port for updates... correct me if im wrong.
@GingerFox
All Blu-ray 2.0 players have an Ethernet cable connection, but any that are bellow that might or might not have one, and even with the Ethernet connection available it doesn't mean the device's firmware has been configured to be updated through this method, some devices still require a system update disc to update the firmware even though they have an Ethernet port, Toshiba most likely has configured their player to be Ethernet update enabled because most likely this is an updated version of their HD DVD configuration which the Ethernet was the recommended method of updating the system.
Nevermind "disk media" or "downloading". External hard drives are now cheap and plentiful. Sneakernet will rise again.
To me to have a player not connect to the net is a bonus.
Can someone tell me why $200 is a bad price for a Blu-ray player from a decent manufacturer?
Suppose you don't want all that other stuff(streaming Netflix, Pandora, etc., or games) but just want a stand alone player.
As an HD DVD supporter I can tell you I have no interest in this at all, and its not because its a Blu-ray player, its because I've owned a Blu-ray player on my Laptop for over a year and have used it a total of 2 times, once to try it out and see how well it works the other to watch a movie loaned to me by a friend who didn't have the DVD version of the movie. BTW My laptop plays back Blu-rays at an equal quality to the PS3 and I actually have tons of games to choose from.
BTW the reason why the PS3 is one of the best players on the market is because its easy to update in comparison to the other units which often require maintenance discs to update. My laptop works the same way, and I can use it for things other than "entertainment".
So do you have a big quality screen to connect to that laptop, or do you actually try to watch a blu-ray movie on a laptop?
I have a 42" LCD HDTV that I can connect using my Laptop's HDMI port, or I can watch it using the 20.1" monitor the laptop carries or my using HDMI connect it to my Home PC's 24" HD Monitor, I've connected it to a TV using HDMI when I was just testing it out, the other time I just wanted to watch the movie so I watched it on the laptop monitor.
One thing I've noticed this article is lacking is good journalism.
What the Article doesn't say is where the players are manufactured!
Just after the HD vs Bluray war was one by Bluray, Toshiba went and opened up one of the biggest factories that makes the bluray chip. They could do this because the money they had left over from their HD failure.
This was possibly the smartest move by Toshiba, because they control the supply of the bluray chips
Are we going to get a review of this unit any time soon?
And if we do, are we going to have to sit through a bunch of snarky Toshiba-aimed remarks as we read it?
There goes engadget again shilling for sony. This is the main reason why I stopped going to engadget hd last year. If I want to read a pro-format site full of fanboyism and flame wars I will do so. I thought engadget was trying to differentiate themselves from sites like that. And I really don't think toshiba is too bitter about the format war considering how they now own the rights to the cell chip. Every ps3 sold = $$ for toshiba. Nuff said.
@Altair
"outrageously" expensive ?
Bunch of horse shit, sounds like.
The PS3 is one of the worst Blu Ray players on the market,
All is want is a quality, stand alone blue ray player made by a decent a reputable manufacturer that i can trust.
This will be the blue ray player for me, i've always owned toshiba products and i've never had an issue.
I dont' want any of this gaming, "ohhh it's sooo easy to update!", incredibly noisy fan while playing blue ray's, sony rubbish, that most people on here seem to be using as thier girlfriends
Chaz...
Actually at the time of launch the PS3 was the best player on the market, it was the only one which would be compatible with future updates, due to having the abilities to access the Internet and use advanced java so it was compatible with BD v1.1 and v2.0, and it was cheaper than many of the other ones on the market, once the HD war was in full swing it was outselling any other HD player for the fact that it was a game system, HD DVD players vs Blu-ray dedicated players HD DVD was selling 1.5-2 to 1, but since it took over a year for Sony to get the ball rolling on having a decent number of titles for the PS3 many were being used for BD Players only giving Blu-ray 2-3 to 1 advantage over HD DVD in disc sales. Now there are far better dedicated players than the PS3, which has the one of the slowest Blu-ray drive on the market now.
Why would I support a company that dropped me like a used ho? After I bought into Toshiba's HD DVD and then to have Toshiba drop me in favor of going to the other camp, tells me Toshiba isn't worth another dime of my money.
Toshiba dropped HD DVD because in the market they only had 2 major companies producing movies for them after May of 2008, when Warner would have dropped them, Paramount would have not resigned their exclusive deal with HD DVD PRG in Oct or Nov 2008 leaving them with Universal who wasn't under any real binding contract with HD DVD PRG other than the fact that they were on the executive board for the group. Toshiba has refocused their efforts in other venues of technology since then, and probably made a deal with Sony to drop their pursuit of HD DVD after Warner went to Blu-ray in trade for a lucrative cell processor manufacturing deal giving them 2/3rds of the cell processor manufacturing in the world, now only IBM and Toshiba make Cell Processors, they also focused heavy on the Flash and SSD Media aspect of of storage. Toshiba is manufacturing Blu-ray players because it really doesn't cost them anything to do it and in the market of brand names vs second brand names Toshiba is slightly higher priced than the second brand names and is the cheapest brand name on the market (at this time) with a full Blu-ray player, the high brand name players which are cheaper are not 2.0 players. They really had no choice in the matter DVD players are dropping in price and sales, thus they need a market which will last them to their ultimate goal of Digital Distribution, because only people who still think Optical media has a chance of surviving are hard-line dreamers who don't see the trend of digital storage medias, even the industry has accepted that optical media is on its last, short, generation.