Audio Video News

Late last week Amazon inadvertently posted and started taking pre-orders on 3rd-gen HD DVD players from Toshiba. The posts were quickly pulled, but obviously the cat was out of the bag. This week Toshiba went ahead and offically announced the trio of third generation players, which will go on sale in September and October.

How does Toshiba plan to move forward in the wake of HD DVD's demise? The company's CEO says improved DVD upconversion is among the strategies to be pursued. Here's a nugget from a Wall Street Journal interview with Atsutoshi Nishida: "If you watch standard DVDs on our players, the images are of very high quality because they include an 'upconverting' feature. And we're going to improve this even more, so that consumers won't be able to tell the difference from HD DVD images. The players would be much cheaper than Blu-ray players too."

Good consumer electronics keep getting better and cheaper.

HD DVD launched in retail stores with something between a whimper and minor bang earlier this week. Although there were only two HD DVD titles from Warner available in most stores, <I>The Last Samurai</I> and <I>Phantom of the Opera</I>, Toshiba's initial, admittedly smallish run of players was sold out after just two days of availability.

Toshiba showed a DVD player with advanced upconverting capabilities last week, following through on an idea mentioned by its CEO five months ago in the wake of HD DVD's demise.

Toshiba is apparently going to attempt to swamp the market with HD DVD players ahead of the arrival in stores of standalone Blu-ray disc players or PlayStation 3, but is taking a high-risk route in doing so. The HD DVD developer and backer reached an agreement with and licensed their technology to Chinese manufacturers, opening the door to inexpensive players and the kind of price wars that have turned current standard definition DVD players into ubiquitous commodity items.

How is Toshiba managing to mourn the painful and expensive death of HD-DVD? Well, with a little bit of R&D therapy, it seems. Perhaps spending bucket-loads of cash on an adorable 11-inch robot of limited utility will soothe Toshiba's angst....