Toshiba Plans Blu-Ray Killer Pt. 2 June 1, 2008
Read more Blu-ray , Entertainment , Gadgets , Gizmodo UK , HD , HD DVD , HDTV
After the humiliating defeat of the high-def, HD DVD format, earlier this year Toshiba is back with another secret weapon designed to topple arch-rival, Blu-ray.
Most interesting of all is that the company thinks it can do it with your existing DVD collection. Toshiba will launch a new DVD player at the end of the year that will feature an integrated chip that will convert DVD images into high-resolution that, it claims, will rival Blu-ray video. Toshiba sources maintain that this is not just another DVD upscaler and it will market the new chip in DVD players that are a lot cheaper than Blu-ray machines.
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
RSS Feed
Comments
This is a good idea, and it would sell, but last time I heard, alchemy wasnt possible.
How can this work? It has to convincingly make about 1,650,000 pixels come out of nowhere, and it says this will look like HD?
I'll believe it when I see it, but that is one hell of a rabbit to pull out of a hat.
I have yet to get an HD player of any sort, but if this can do what they say then i would choose it over BlueRay any day. Mainly because of the price of BlueRay disks and players, but also because I hate Sony.
As I have a existing library of over 200 DVD's, a player that gives better quality than up-scaling in a Blu-Ray player is going to be of interest. And of course there is the much lower costs of new DVD's versus Blue-Ray disks. Particularly when a newly released DVD can be bought in a 3 for £20 deal after only 3 months.
Having said that, I too have to ask questions about how you turn a 350,000 pixel recording into 2m pixel near HD playback. If it wasn't stored in HD I don't know how you can do anything to make it HD. Still, there are smarter people out there than me so I'll be watching to see what happens.
when Toshiba lost the HD war, the first thing they did was rebrand hd-dvd players as upscaling dvd players. My guess is they're using the same hd-dvd technology again here.
And lets say alchemy is possible, and Toshiba can turn sd (576 lines) into hd (720 lines). Then surely using the same technology you can turn 720 lines into 1080 lines, or 1080 lines into 1400 lines - so blue ray maintains its advantage!
Of course to actually see the extra detail you get in a 1400 line image you'd need a 50 inch + screen, but home projectors are getting more and more popular nowadays...