When Toshiba lost the battle of the high definition formats earlier this year, many people wondered where it would go next. Today we have the answer: back to the humble DVD.

Toshiba’s HD DVD format was arguably better looking than the Sony-backed Blu-ray format which ended up winning the fight to become the dominant high definition format of the future. But it died nonetheless, unable to compete with the fact that the Playstation 3 was acting as a kind of trojan horse, putting Blu-ray in the homes of millions of people whether they were ever going to use it or not.

Now, apart from a few formats which don’t stand a chance of gaining any traction, Blu-ray has the market sewn up. Sort of. The problem is that there is still one format that refuses to die, the SD DVD. It’s a format which is still the main choice when purchasing films for everyone but the early adopting techno-geeks, and that’s after three years of Blu-ray being on the market.

So that is where Toshiba is now focussing its attention – going after the crowd who may have a large library of DVDs but are unwilling, or financially unable, to upgrade to Blu-ray. To that end, it has launched its XD-E500 DVD player, an up-converting player like no other before it (according to Toshiba).

According to Yahoo News, the XD-E500 “produced a subtle but noticeable sharpening of the image” when compared to another unnamed DVD player in a demonstration to reporters last week. The difference comes from the XDE technology built in to the player which sharpens images and improves contrast and colour quality as well.

The player will sell for $149, which is around double the price point that most up-scaling SD DVD players retail for, but half the price of an average Blu-ray player.

I just can’t see who is going to buy this player, as if you’re going to spend any money on a DVD player at this stage, you might as well buy a Blu-ray player or PS3 and have the full range of options available to you. DVD won’t die for a long while yet, but this move feels a bit like flogging a dead horse to me. Just move on already.

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Entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 12:05 pm under High Definition Formats, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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