Even though it conceded the high-definition format to Blu-ray six months ago, Toshiba is back with its recently announced XDE DVD upconversion technology, and a new DVD player that offers the technology.
The extended detail enhancement obviously hasn't been designed to compete with Blu-ray, but will instead allow consumers to have near HD quality from their DVD collection. The format offers 1080p on HDTVs that do not have an official high-definition format.
The Toshiba XD-E500 DVD player has a $149.99 retail price tag, which has left industry analysts scratching their heads. There is at least one other upconverting DVD player available on the market, but its price is almost half of the XD-E500, with only subtle differences between the two.
During a press conference held by Toshiba last week, Toshiba played a standard DVD with an XDE player and a regular DVD player on LCD HDTVs side-by-side. The upconversion helps sharpen edges and helps reduce blurriness that typically happens when DVDs are played on larger TVs.
Toshiba's HD DVD format painfully lost a battle with Sony's Blu-ray format, in which Toshiba officially killed the format in January. The company now will launch an advertising campaign, including the toshibaxde.com web site, in an effort to help promote its upconversion technology it hopes consumers will graciously adopt.
Blu-ray is especially popular among home-theater gurus, but hasn't caught on among mainstream consumers in North America or anywhere else. ABI Research reports Sony PlayStation 3 console sales are helping Blu-ray sales stay afloat, as interest in standalone Blu-ray players has been dismal.
I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what this piece of hardware brings to the table.
Well, I was excited about it. But now, after reading some of the early reports on the net concerning the press conference, I think this thing is not worth all the hype. Check out C|Nets take on this player. I am not a big fan of C|Net, but I think they have this thing pegged. They say it is just a subtle difference and that the other two modes aside from sharpening are not so great either. The color enhancement in their opinion, caused blowout. Also, you can only use one of the exxtra enhancements at a time with the sharpening feature. I think I will stick with my Oppo.
Off topic to the editors of this article: Source links are broken
I'll still take full HD blu ray over this anyday but I do have a DVD colllection and would like to see if MS can make this work on the 360 without hardware add on. It should be able to, I don't think this requires a special reader, but will they ? MS tends to be cheap when it comes to the topic of paying royalites, that's one reason it took them so long to add DIVX support. I think that's also why 360 doesn't do upconversion to 1080i, I believe that is someone's patent.
LOL.....Why get near HD quality when you can have real HD quality?
"By BluBalls (guest), Tuesday 19 August 2008 16:00
LOL.....Why get near HD quality when you can have real HD quality?" Because people don't want to "invest" thousands of dollars to see a sharper version of a movie when DVD is just fine and dirt cheap. Look at the new Yamaha player for Bluray- 1200 dollars and it is not even the latest profile! People might be smart right now, to spend $1 or $200 though if it makes their present collection look significantly better. Oh and LOL...
How can this get close to a hd-dvd/blu-ray disc? The info isn't there on the tv to make a sharp vibrant digital compression free copy? There fore is had to extrapolotate from the surrounding data to figure out what to put in the missing pixels.
I don't really see how it can come close, because its going to have to make up the data that isn't there.
Why didn't they add the upconversion tech, and then also add an HD decoder as well. Then it would play Blu-ray quality streams, or any other HD media burned to the disc, as well as doing the upconvert of regular DVDs, and a downconvert of the HD to non-HD tvs. It seems to me that'd get them a much bigger level of acceptance. 8GB of MPEG-4 video might need to be a tad more compressed to get a full movie on the disc as compared to a Blu-ray disc, but it can be done, and doesn't look bad, and is still better than the standard DVD. It just seems they'd have far more options that way. But hey, if they had any brains to begin with, they wouldn't have gotten into a format war in the first place. But since none of these comapnies really give a hoot about the consumer, why bother making products that might be useful.
Zod: It really doesn't get anywhere near the quality of a Blu-ray player, but like others have mentioned, the cost difference (and the fact many of us still have large DVD collections) possibly make it worth investing in. But the high $150 price tag for a standard DVD player will keep me from wanting to purchase one any time in the near future.
If I see Toshiba drop prices for it closer to the holidays, I would honestly be down with purchasing one.
I won't get one as I see no need to pay so much for a player that doesn't really do any more than a good upconverter. I already own a PS3 and put my movies and backups in it to play and can see a huge difference in quality.
So is this the great Toshiba anti-Blu-Ray thingy? LOL! And $150? Double LOL!
Who knows, it's unclear whether or not this is the "super upconvertor" technology. It seems like it is not, as Toshiba USA reps have claimed that this is not supposed to compete with Blu-ray.
@Blurayfreak
Good point- from TG Daily: "While XDE has replaced the HD DVD section on Toshiba’s website, no further details about the player were released at the time of announcement. It was widely expected that Toshiba would leverage a stripped down version of the Cell processor to increase the processing power of its new DVD players. At this time, there is no confirmation whether this is the case or not."
Yeah but at $149?
The regular Toshiba upcoverter is only $69 at bestbuy. So at twice the price, this must be the super upconverter. 
For only $30 more you can get an NMT and have full HD/SD media compatibilty + upscaling. I want what ever Toshiba is smoking :P
Are there any screen grabs so we can make our own choice to compare? If people really want HD from there DVD's, buy a good DVD player with a 1080p upscaler.
Toshiba needs to take it like a man as Blu-Ray is here to stay.
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