Toshiba HD DVD
Toshiba’s Double Shot of HD DVD Love
CES saw the first salvoes of the next great consumer electronics format war. It’s being called the 21st century’s biggest battle of big business, the battle for next generation optical storage format supremacy. We just call it HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray. Panasonic and Sony have shown us what they have in their forthcoming Blu-Ray boxes. These "boxes" are very expensive and, in Panasonic’s case, the Blu-Ray looks like it was designed to play your VHS collection of T.J. Hooker episodes. Toshiba, on the other hand, is offering a product that is stylish and sleek.
At the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, this past January, in Las Vegas, Toshiba showcased their very impressive HD DVD players. Toshiba presented two different models of blue laser devices.
Toshiba’s pair of HD DVD players are supposed to be available by March, 2006. The HD-A1 will go for $499, while the slightly more elaborate HD-XA1 will go for $799. While these might not be cheap by most people’s standards, they are considerably less expensive than the previous next generation DVD players we’ve seen at CES. Price is sure to be a top consideration in the format war as the first products hit store shelves. It is estimated that the Blu-Ray recorders could cost thousands more than HD DVD systems. . However, you have to give Blu-Ray its due for providing a larger variety of movie releases at its launch.
The HD-XA1 and HD-A1 are just the prototype names for Toshiba’s forthcoming HD DVD units. The names could change by the time they hit the market. So far we know that the players will support the usual codecs, including Mpeg2, Mpeg3, AVC and VC-1. The main differences between the XA1 and the A1 will be that the more expensive XA1 will have a motorized carriage to pick up your discs, a backlight remote, and a pair of USB ports for game controllers. Could the game controllers be for some future exotic use of HD DVD’s iHD feature we’ve been hearing about? Toshiba’s players will only output video via an HDMI port. This is bad news if you’re not among those HD TV owners that have an HDCP compatible digital video input. The HDMI output on the new HD DVD players will support either HDMI or DVI. Sorry, older HD TVs with component inputs aren’t sufficient.
The lack of analog outputs on the HD DVD players could be seen as a sort of limitation. Blu-ray boasts that they will indeed be able to output to analog component inputs, but this has yet to be seen in practice. However, is the lack of analog really a limitation? Analog video outputs on a source device means down-conversion to an analog signal. It will offer the best chances of getting the cleanest possible digital signal to your TV using a digital only device as HD DVD promises to be.
Overall, it looks a lot better for HD DVD than it did not to long ago. Shockingly, the latest word from Sony and Toshiba execs is that they’re both hopeful that a unified standard will be found soon as neither side of the format war appears to be securing market dominance. 2006 should be an exciting year.
