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Toshiba currently has no plans to produce Blu-ray hardware.
The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting Q&A with Toshiba’s Chief Executive Atsutoshi Nishida—the man behind the plan to pull HD DVD.
There are a some neat nuggets in there, and I’m not talking about Nishida’s list of hobbies. It seems that the company has no plans to pile on to the Blu-ray bandwagon anytime soon. Instead, they plan to push standard DVD players, claiming that’s still where the action is at. While you may be crying over your format decision, Toshiba is not; Nishida says they still have 44 other businesses flourishing, including TV and PC segments.
They will still offer DVD, however—just not high-def. Instead, Toshiba will focus on the art of upconverting. “And we’re going to improve this even more, so that consumers won’t be able to tell the difference from HD DVD images,” Nishida said. “The players would be much cheaper than Blu-ray players too. Next-generation DVD players are in a much weaker position than when standard DVD players were first introduced.”
Nishida also said they knew the HD DVD ship was going down as soon as Warner made its Blu-ray announcement back in January. “We were doing this to win, and if we weren’t going to win then we had to pull out, especially since consumers were already asking for a single standard,” he said.
One other interesting revelation: Toshiba is hoping to get into video downloads. “We’ve been developing technologies in this area already, but now that we don’t have the HD DVD business, I want to put even more energy into that,” Nishida said.
Toshiba first announced its plans to withdrawal from the high-def DVD market last month. All production and shipments are expected to end by the end of this month.
Steveo, I agree that the advancements are amazing with up-converting. I look forward to seeing these added with future blu-ray players so people can get the best of both worlds. Either a TRUE HD image with no artificial up-conversion or, for their SD collection, use the converter.
I just dont see a DVD player with an amazing up-converter ever replacing ‘natural’ HD.
The prices for Blu-ray will still come down as Sony are not the only makers of this format, so there is still a level of compatition….
..and to another poster:- The adoption of HDM was dramatically slowed down by the format war. Guess what…...
I read that Toshiba lost enough to impact their stock. And it went up (~50% of the down) when it decided to end the HD-DVD effort (the old stop the bleeding trick). Regardless of the quantity of the cost, I don’t think it’s going to damage them. As th man said, they have 44 profit centers. This is not a small company - it will all be studied in lessons learned…and they seem to have repositioned themselves very very smartly.
I need to clarify. I suggest that if a human can do it, a chip can do it. “it” being look at the image and add appropriate info, lines/fills etc. It’s really just math and really fast processing. The HQ chips are already at 1 Teraflop.
A lot of people either never knew or have conveniently forgotten that Toshiba gets a royalty on DVD sales.
This was particularly amusing during the “format wars” here and on other sites when the HD DVD proponents acted as if Toshiba was doing some altruistic service by opposing “evil Sony.”
I wonder how much Toshiba lost on HD DVD hardware sales as they desperately tried to get ahold of those royalties into the next generation.
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I don’t think anyone or company really expects upconversion to replace HDM - just hurt it. They may say it, but as optimistic as I am, I don’t think they can achieve full HD from 480.
BUT, for the 90% of the market that could care-less about fine detail, a cheap player that does a really great job, that their best friend or kid says is about as good as Blu-ray…and cost under a hundred dollars - and they’re buying a new TV anyway, (breath) well, I’d expect a lot of sales there.
Blu-Ray is clearly better - but it’s market window is narrow between interest, cost, new technology - if it is expect to get out of being a large-ish niche, it need to be agressive still.
I read a lot of frothing on AVSforum about this. Most writers are thinking this is just filters and tweaks. I am optimistically hoping for a better HQV type of processor. Single, fast chip. But it maybe that this is already done and is 960p. If that is done well, and again, cheap, it’d be hard to drop the $400 vs. <$100