Toshiba's XDE DVD players won't hurt Blu-ray Disc
When Toshiba announced its new XDE DVD player promising it could convert the picture quality of standard DVDs up to the HD, industry watchers took note.
The company has been a champion of video technologies for years and its own high definition disc standard, HD DVD (high definition DVD), had been beaten as the HD successor to DVDs earlier in the year by Sony's Blu-ray Disc standard.
It looked like maybe the XDE DVD player was a way for Toshiba to take some revenge on Sony.
Toshiba has already announced a loss of ¥108.5 billion (US$992.2 million) related to its withdrawal from the HD DVD business and said it expects further losses.
But despite some nice technology aboard the XDE DVD player and a lower price, there are several reasons to believe it won't hurt Blu-ray Disc at all.
"The impact will likely be minimal," said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for consumer technology at The NPD Group.
"There is now great industry support behind Blu-ray and the format is moving forward with enhancements that move beyond high-definition such as the BD-Live spec that integrates Internet connectivity options with the disc," he said.
One of the main problems is that DVD technology simply does not measure up to Blu-ray Disc. A person buying an XDE DVD player or any other upconverting DVD player is really making a choice to accept a nice visual experience at a lower cost.
"The reality is that when you start with standard definition, there's only so much you can do to it to make it look better at a higher resolution," said Jake Richter, analyst at Jon Peddie Research.
"The best upscaling technology in the world can't make average quality standard definition content look like high quality HD content because the content just isn't there," he added.
Still, Toshiba's new player strikes a few chords on the economic front.
Pinched by high gas prices, a declining housing market and a greater jobless rate than in the past few years, people may choose to buy DVD upconverters so they can keep using DVD collections they've spent years building.
XDE DVD players cost about half the price of a Blu-ray Disc player.
"Blu-ray is too expensive," said Michelle Abraham, principal analyst at In-Stat. Consumers are interested in Blu-ray Disc, but they are looking more at players that cost less than US$200, she said.
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why do reviewers insist on
why do reviewers insist on comparing upscaling technology to blu-ray? The only comparisons that really matter are to 1) an existing non-upscaling dvd player relying on the TV chip to do the re-sizing 2) any other (cheap or otherwise) upscaling dvd player, and 3) to the upscaling abilities of blu-ray devices such as PS3. The issue for the consumer is how to get the best out of our existing DVD collections on our nice new HD and HD-ready TVs? A lot of people won't be going blu-ray anytime soon, no matter how good it is at true HD, because we have standard def dvds that we still want to play looking as good as possible. Some reviews rate this Toshiba XD as far better than the low cost upscalers and simply relying on the TV's chips; considerably better than the upscaling in PS3; even a little better than the results from some 'dedicated' top of the range upscalers. I'd say that was a result that not only Tosh should be pretty happy with, but everyone with a dvd collection they don't want to dump. Chances are that while bluray fanboys will keep banging on about how "upscaling sucks" and "Blu rocks", the whole disk player industry will need to get on board with any technology (Xd or whatever) that raises the bar on what your 'old' dvds can look like. With this device Tosh have shown the possibilities and done us all a service.oh, and another thing! As to
oh, and another thing! As to whether the new Toshiba XD kit will "hurt Blu-ray?" and the "is it a Blu-ray killer?" question....while I said in previous post that comparison with Blu-ray rather misses the point, it must be true that if something comes along that "breathes new life into your existing DVD collection" (to quote some of the ad blurb) it WILL have an impact on the take up of BR. I've seen some threads elsewhere where BR fans throw minor tantrums at this prospect along the 'having 'lost the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray "war", how dare Toshiba come up with this stunt?' - type of thing. Their message is usually to the effect that Toshiba should 'get over it'. Well, this is competitive capitalism boys: if Tosh's XD makes them money while 'hurting' Blu-ray's sales take-off, well, as they say 'get over it'.