I agree with Jason that Toshiba tried to come out with a evolutionary (not revolutionary like Blu-Ray) HD format that was relatively inexpensive, but achieved great results. I don't fault them for 1080i in their first-gen players, as very few people have 1080p and Toshiba was probably waiting for HDMI 1.3 spec anyway.
There has be some sort of unity, whether it comes from universal hybrid players, or one of the formats dying off. Both formats will go the way of SACD/DVD-Audio if they continue down this road. With all the VOD-type technologies just starting to come into their own, cable and satellite increasing their bandwidth someone will capitalize big on this. Consumers want no part of this war. And for most of them, upscaled SD DVD looks great on their new HDTV and they can choose all the movie titles they want without restriction.
My hat is off to Toshiba for trying to set some kind of unification between the 2. Sony is pretty thick (mini-disc, SACD), so I doubt it will happen.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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I agree with Jason that Toshiba tried to come out with a evolutionary (not revolutionary like Blu-Ray) HD format that was relatively inexpensive, but achieved great results. I don't fault them for 1080i in their first-gen players, as very few people have 1080p and Toshiba was probably waiting for HDMI 1.3 spec anyway.
There has be some sort of unity, whether it comes from universal hybrid players, or one of the formats dying off. Both formats will go the way of SACD/DVD-Audio if they continue down this road. With all the VOD-type technologies just starting to come into their own, cable and satellite increasing their bandwidth someone will capitalize big on this. Consumers want no part of this war. And for most of them, upscaled SD DVD looks great on their new HDTV and they can choose all the movie titles they want without restriction.
My hat is off to Toshiba for trying to set some kind of unification between the 2. Sony is pretty thick (mini-disc, SACD), so I doubt it will happen.