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Toshiba goes Blu-Ray
ONE of the biggest champions of HD-DVD is to make its first Blu-Ray player.
Toshiba, which spent an absolute fortune in the HD-wars, gave up the ghost when major studios refused to back the format and the big distribution chains decided that it was not financially viable.
For a while Tosh has been talking about getting more mileage from existing DVD technology, but now it seems that it has thrown in the towel all together and built a Blu-Ray player of its own.
Details of the player are sketchy. It appears to have the catchy title of BD-18 and will be in the shops in Japan in time for the Christmas sales.
The dark satanic rumour mill suggests that Tosh is considering a Blu-ray recorder for the Japanese market, though no further details on that are available.
The source of the rumour appears to be the Japanese magazine Yomiuri which mostly bases its story on un-named sources, but it is fairly likely to be true.
It would be unlike Tosh to want to let its rivals make huge amounts of money out of future formats and leave it behind. Of course if it wanted to knock down the price, it could even end up as the industry leader. µ
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On Gizmag there's an article today about a reusable 256GB memory key. Sort of kicks blu ray and HD DVD both in the backsides. More expensive yes, but also re-usable, pocketable, several times more space than the biggest disc, and I daresay more reliable in the long run. Networked media tanks are also much cheaper than any blu ray player and seem to be unanimously open sauce; whereas high-def discs are unanimously closed-sauce. We do prefer open sauce.
The only useful outcome of the high-def war was that it provided an avenue for publishers to produce high-def movie files for media tank users to download. I considered buying a LG combo HD DVD / Blu ray drive in the early days but balked at the $100 price tag; and am glad I did.
Seriously, want to get back at your rivals (and perhaps alienate all the content providers - tee hee whoops!) strip off all the DRM and open source the S.O.B.
All the nerdy nerds would flock to it. Hell, I could probably get my Grandma to use it too. It would seriously gain foot hold. As it stands now, everyone (smart anyhow) is buying upconverting regular DVD players and skipping "Too-Expensive Ray" all together. Like me!
Sigh...
Agree with Rich H
I've got a Tosh EP35 and just got a Oppo BDP83 Blueray. Considering how long the Tosh has been out the Oppo hasn't got any more to offer than the Tosh. HD DVD had all the features that BlueRay are only just starting to get with Profile 2. Trouble is Tosh lost the Bullshite war
I bought my first HD-DVD player the week after Toshiba announced that they were dropping the format. I bought the Xbox360 drive for $50 from a local store. Since then I bought 2 more players, one was an LG combo drive for my HTPC that plays both BR and HD. Personally I was rooting for HD over BR mainly because I don't like Sony. I currently own about 50 movies on HD-DVD and 5 on BR. When I can buy HD on clearance for $5-10 each I see no reason not to buy.
If Microsoft had incorporated the HD-DVD drive into the Xbox360 we would probably be talking about the end of BluRay today. From talking to one of their engineers, they did not incorporate the drive at launch mainly because the first gen of HD-DVD ROM drives were too slow, and they were expensive. It would have added $60-100 to the BOM of each system, and the number of available units at launch would have been about half of what they had otherwise.
Many of the programmers today that I've talked to really wish that they were designing games for HD-DVD rather than DVD since they would have 30GB per disc to work with instead of 9GB.
Sony also took forever to get the BR spec completed. It took over 2 years for BR to have all of the same capabilities that HD had on Day 1. Yes, a dual layer BR disc will hold 50GB compared to HD's 30GB, but almost all of my BR discs are single layer while most of my HD discs are dual layer. The main reason that they never released their 3-layer 51GB HD-DVD disc was because they could not make it compatible with all existing HD-DVD hardware. Sony has no such sentiment toward early adapters, as they now have 3 version of BR discs, which have only limited backward compatibility.
Nick says that major studios refused to back the format and that major retailers did the same. That is just flat out inaccurate. Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, Dreamworks, Paramount, and Studio Canal are not "major?" And last time I checked, HD DVD was available in every major retailer in the world basically. HD DVD failed because Warner Brothers pulled out after supporting both formats for 2 years or so. Toshiba saw the writing on the wall and called it quits. Nick please stop rewriting history because you couldn't be bothered to do some basic homework.
It's "HD DVD."
Microsoft didn't use HD-DVD because: 1) Money. It costs money to put those players into each XBOX and there was no guarantee of further sales depending on who won the format war. If they lost, they'd still have to have the pricey players in their console with no benefit, and be humiliated that they lost the market war.
2) They didn't care which side won. But they DID want to drag the battle out a little bit so that digital distribution gained a stronger foothold. Hence, the HD-DVD addon flop.
Personally, I think the wrong side won. I was rooting for HD-DVD. Alas, the porn industry didn't come to the rescue this time, like they did with VHS.
At least here in the U.S. I have serious doubts there is much of a future for Blue Ray. The players are too expensive for many, the disks are way to expensive and the quality difference in not enough to really motivate the market. Toshiba developed some excellent up-conversion technology that upgraded the play back of standard DVD's to very near the quality of most Blu Ray DVD's of that title. I do not see a big future for Blu Ray in the U.S.
yes dave but then xbox 360 would have also been prohibitively more expensive to manufacture, and also delayed by some months til HD DVD titles and players hit the market in march 2006. bluray has been much of sonys undoing, if microsoft had come to the party with a 400 pound console then they wouldnt have gotten anything like the early sales and market lead over ps3 that the currently enjoy. i dont see any game on ps3 thus far in truth that has done something multiple discs couldnt do, MGS4's 2 minute installs may as well be a 20 second disc swap for example!!!
But if Microsoft had used HD-DVD for it's storage then Toshiba wouldn't have lost all the money.
I still to this day did not understand why Microsoft before they released 360 didn't think about using HD-DVD for it's games.
Even some of it's games on DVD 9 dont use the full 8.7GB I installed Mass Effect on my HDD and it only used 6.8GB. Yeah HD-DVD Vs Blu-Ray came out once PS3 was launched but MS thought hang on lets back the HD-DVD format surly they must have had that planned just after its own consoles launch.