Toshiba returns to DVD

it says a lot that Toshiba won't even try a trot out a fake demo like monster cable does in big box stores. Well here in the US big box stores MC does that.

I wonder how well they'll sell those 200$ DVD players this holiday season when competition creates even more price pressure on BD players? I mean with bargain brands showing up at Walmart and all.

Toshiba, milking the last drops from the cash cow's drying udder.

Might not look as good as a Blue Ray, may only save you $100 over the cost of a BR player, but you can continue to buy disks that cost 1/3 to 1/2 of what BR disk costs, and you can upgrade the way your current library plays.

Well, I'm not ready to drop $30/movie, so I'm sticking to DVD movies for a few more years.

It'll be another 5 years before Blu-Ray gets as ubiquitous as DVD.

I have an extensive (legal) DVD collection of over 400 titles that I'm in no hurry to replace with BluRay any time soon - I'd be happy to see this thing for real.

Yeah, Toshiba! Great deal! I hould pay you $150 for a DVD player? Why? It scales? Oh. OK, so does my HDTV. You know I take a bog standard $40 DVD player with HDMI output and plug it in, and hey presto, my HDTV scales the picture up to full screen. A jolly good thing too, otherwise it would be this tiny little rectangle in the middle of the screen. Fancy that though, the TV upscales. Gee, almost as if I don't need that ridiculously expensive DVD player to do it for me. And hey, if I'm in the market for a $150 DVD player, I think I can probably afford to wait a month and get that BD player which will also provide some nifty DVD upscaling as well.

Really Toshiba, what is the point? There's being a sore loser and then there's simply being a loser. The fundamental truth here is this. a DVD has between a seventh and a fifth of the picture resolution that a Blu-Ray has. Even with the best will in the world, you can't take a VGA quality image and scale it to the 2Mpixel range and get the kind of quality you get from a raw 2Mpixel image. Anyone who's used photo editing software knows that there are limits to how much enhancement you can perform. Since the DVD player has to perform the scaling on every frame, it';s not like it can take 30 seconds over each image to enhance it, so how special can that scaling actually be?

DVD is fine, scaled DVD is good. Look at what a decent HDTV can do with DVD images, or a PS3 for that matter. But scaled DVD will never compete on quality with BD. Some will no doubt post that it can, but come on, the truth is that it can't unless you're half blind or have an agenda.

Video data is highly redundant which makes it relatively easy to compress it without any noticeable loss to the viewer. The final quality does involve some tradeoffs, though -- you can see quite distinct differences in the quality of different upconverting equipment.

I don't know what's wrong with BluRay owners. They're some of the most aggressive posters I know of on the Internet. They're obsessed with owning "the best" but the way they react suggests that they don't really know what they own, just that they paid a lot of money for it. They should lighten up a bit. BluRay won't dominate for some time because its just not cost effective for most people -- its delivering more information than their eyes can use so they don't notice the difference. BluRay recording is also a bit of a niche; those of us who record data on optical media realize that putting all your data eggs into one disk isn't a good idea -- every time you start a session you risk the whole disk. There's a "sweet spot" for disk capacity and its currently a big CD -- or small DVD.

In one of the original overviews I read of this technology it mentioned that the player would download additional content from the internet for the various DVD titles to give the same feature options as HD-DVD. If this is indeed true, and one of the downloaded features happens to be replacement key frames in 1080p, then there is a very good chance that the upscaled picture quality would be comparable to that of BR.

Kudos to Toshiba. Perhaps they can let the rest of the tech world know that BluRay really doesn't matter much to the average person. The DVD video coming out of my 5 year old modded xbox looks great. Is it as good as Bluray? No, but it still looks great and in the end, the quality of the movie is really the story and the acting, not whether I can pick out the creases and pores of Samual Jackson's face.

Although the information to "upscale" is not present in a single frame, when anything is in motion, then theoretically, it is being sampled in different locations, and so from frame to frame, you should be able to pull out that detail, and then use that to fill in, forwards and backwards. (Maybe that is how they already do it!)

Where is my comment! I hate you limeys.

What's up Martin, still feeling a little slighted because Toshiba didn't 'win'?

Your point appears to be that BluRay is not needed because compression can fit similar quality on a regular DVD.

The trouble with this and many other statements about compression is very, very simple. Blu-Ray uses a better compression standard than regular DVD. So the level of compression on a BD is already higher than that on a DVD. Not only that, but the very compression standards that people wheel out as reasons why BD is not needed, are in fact already part and parcel of the BD standard. VC-1 and H.264 are both part of the Blu-Ray standard.

When you use a lossy algorithm to aggressively compress an already highly compressed source, there is only one consequence - data loss.

@androticus

Motion detection algorithms are already present in de-interlacing systems, which is part of the ver all upscaling. Really, there is a limit to how much extra you can get from the fram. You're being dishonest if you suggest that a VGA image can upscale to anything remotely similar to a 2Mpixel image, no matter how much interpolation/extrapolation you do. At the end of the day you're taking a 300Kpixel image and guessing at the other 1.7Mpixels. Does that sound like it will give you a good picture?