Oh Toshiba, has it really come to this? After a humiliating loss to Blu-ray, Tosh just unveiled its new $150 XD-E500 DVD player. It's no run o' the mill DVD player mind you, this unit touts Toshiba's new eXtended Detail Enhancement (XDE) technology -- that
super-duper resolution
upconverting tech meant to fill the void between ubiquitous upconverting players and Blu-ray. Unfortunately, the player demonstrated offered just "subtle but noticeable sharpening of the image" when compared side-by-side (in a controlled demonstration) with an unnamed $70 upscaler -- to its credit, Tosh did not try to compare its new player with an HD-capable Blu-ray machine. Still, more than twice the price for "subtle" hardly sounds like a compelling purchase to us.
Update: Official
press release is now out which, oddly enough, helped us upconvert our 480i/p cynicism to full-blown 1080p/24fps skepticism.
posted Aug 18th 2008 1:33AM
I'd just like to point out, that high end DVD upscalers barely START at $149. If Toshiba has a really good upscaler in comparison to the Blu Ray players, then this player will have a nice niche position.
But then again, Engadget is all-knowing and perfect. All hail, the Engadget Gods, that we may be touched by the smallest of your infinite wisdom!
Don't waste your money on a high-end DVD upscaler.
You cannot recreate detail which was never there to begin with.
With Blu-ray players being had for $300 I doubt the niche market will be very rewarding for Toshibaquiter.
There's a direct link to the specs here: http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/dvd/product.asp?model=xd-e500
Doesn't look that exciting at this point, $150 is about the same price as Toshiba's entry level DVD burner. But it's not particularly expensive either and it's not difficult to see it hitting the $99 mark if the recommended price is $150.
You know what would have been nice? 3X DVD capabilities. Wouldn't have cost that much (if anything) to add it, and would have made it a low-budget HD player for those willing to supply their own content.
Since the suggested retail price is $149... I take it we will be able to get it for around $120? I need to see a dvd player, the xde and a blue ray running side by side... but $120 vs about $350 for a 2.0 bd player and I go $120 XDE while waiting for bd to get affordable.
I'll do you a favour and save you some time. Don't bother comparing it to blu-ray. Toshiba have already avoided doing that. But I suppose in the heart of an undying Toshiba fanboy, anything's possible.
How is this HD news??
Obviously it's not, it is a DVD player and being marketed as such, no mention of HD comparisons.
What is it with this site and it's never ending Toshiba bashing, does your precious blu format come with free oral sex or something?
............"Toshiba didn't demonstrate the XDE against a Blu-ray or HD DVD player, and Louis Masses, director of product planning for the audio and video group at Toshiba America Consumer Products, was careful to stress that it's not meant to compete with or replace Blu-ray.
"If you want Blu-ray, go get Blu-ray. This product is meant to improve playback of DVDs," Masses said.".........
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Lets not let the facts get in the way of a good story eh?
Pushing out a $150 DVD player in a crowded market full of cheaper models doesn't make any sense. It's also notable that Toshiba controlled the demo, choosing the demo material and the player to compare it against. I wonder what real world results will be like.
Boy am I glad to not have to look forward to a rant by Nfinity about how Toshiba's going to save the world and this player is the nail in the coffin for blu-ray!
Whats is this joke from Tosh? (again). Time to admit defeat and launch a BD Player Tosh.
Well color me surprised! It was very obvious from the start of this nonsense that it was no magic wand. You can't pull detail out of thin air, although you might be able to infer some slight detail from differences in frames. Engadget should lift the ban on Nfinity for 1 day just to witness the purple faced spin he puts on all this.
HA! First, the PS3 loses the "kiddie-console" monkier when it is discovered that Criterion and no other than Joe Kane use it as a reference player. Then we find out that Toshiba's "Jesus Player" can't defy physics (you can't recreate data that isn't there). Wow, what a week!
This was all very predictable and obvious. Tools like Video Enhancer create a very slight improvement over interpolation for upscaling. Toshiba obviously wasn't going to do much more than that especially with the added constraint of being realtime. It's definitely a selling point but it's not a killer feature or significant in the broad scheme of things. Toshiba should stop with the dithering and their half-assed plans B, C, D through Z. Much though they may hate Blu Ray they are only hurting themselves by staying away from the format.
Toshiba would be hurting themselves by putting out a Blu-ray player right now.
Look, it's fairly easy to understand. DVD is a developed technology, and XDE is a relatively inexpensive enhancement. This thing will pay for itself as soon as it leaves the factory. These players are not subsidized, they probably only cost around $25 to make, if that.
Toshiba has made a MAJOR loss on HD DVD. It needs money right now, it needs to pull its financials back to something decent.
Meanwhile, Blu-ray is costing those manufacturers who are investing in it billions of dollars, and there is absolutely no guarantee the technology is even going to be successful. For Toshiba to dip its toe into the Blu-waters means losing more money in the short and medium term, and it's not clear they could make the business that profitable in the longer term because, well, either Blu-ray will take off, in which case there's going to be a lot of competition, or it'll fail in which case there'll be no profits to be made in the first place.
(Can someone explain, incidentally, how you're supposed to make money off of Blu-ray right now? Unless you make a player called the "Sony Playstation 3" you can't expect to sell many units. The PS3 is heavily subsidized and isn't technically that much more powerful than the minimum needed to make a Blu-ray player in the first place. You can't undercut the PS3 in price by that much, and there isn't much you can add in terms of functionality either that a PS3 and receiver combination doesn't give you anyway. The PS3 is outselling all other players put together by a factor of ten. What exactly is this "profitable, sane, Toshiba Blu-ray player" going to look like that Engadget's Blubois think should be made?)
So, no, Toshiba - if it's run by sane people - should not be taking the advice of a third-rate HD blog with anger management issues. It should not be investing in Blu-ray at this time. If it becomes profitable to make Blu-ray players, then of course they should look into making such a unit. But now? It's about as dumb as suggesting that the US should pull out of Iraq and immediately invade Iran, just to keep its hand in. The only reason for them to produce a Blu-ray player is to stop Darren Murph from whining about it. I don't think that's worth losing a billion dollars over.
If XDE is based on SpursEngine as claimed for so long then it isn't relatively inexpensive. Spurs SE1000 chips sampled for $100 and probably costs close to $50 at this point in its life. Then you must throw in however much memory is required to juggle multiple frames of content and the CPU / SoC sitting beside the SpursEngine which is driving it.
That is not inexpensive for something that adds marginal improvements to the picture quality. Of course the Toshiba press release doesn't mention Spurs at all so maybe they've gone for Plan B in their Plan B which is a video scaler with some glorified post processing edge enhancement, colour gamut or gamma level tweaks.
As for Blu Ray, I suggest if you have multiple CEs producing players that they are making money from doing so. Some cost more than a PS3, some cost less. Aside from Sony, very few of the others have any reason to be making players if they weren't making money. If Samsung & Funai can sell players for substantially less than the PS3 then you can bet they are still preserving a profit margin.
Well, either the XD E500 is extremely well subsidized, as it would have to be if it contained a $50 chip in it on top of the regular DVD hardware and cost $150, or the SpursEngine does not cost anything close to that, or else the player is not based upon the SpursEngine. Either way, the point remains the same: Toshiba is selling PROFITABLE equipment rather than trying to sell LOSS MAKING Blu-ray equipment. It's fantasy to suggest anyone's profiting from Blu-ray right now: even Sony, who's raking in the royalties, has published losses of $3B+ on the technology. The only way to make a "profitable" Blu-ray player is to make one that sells for well over what it costs to make a Playstation 3, which is a player nobody's going to buy.
Amazon, weirdly enough, thinks its worth $30 more than Toshiba does (item B001D9IWIY, I've tried posting a link but the comments are not showing after well after an hour, so I assume Engadget's blocking Amazon links or something. Or maybe it's just a glitch.)
Right now, with the subsidized Playstation 3 at $400, being pretty much everything anyone would want out of a player, and thus it selling at 10x the rate of all of the other BD players put together, it would be insane to enter the market. If it reaches the point that you can make a player for $100, and sell it for $200, then sure, that's a good time to drop in. Now? I really can't see how anyone would believe it's in Toshiba's best interests to pour money into an avenue with no short term profit when there's no rush to enter the market in the first place.
Right... so Samsung (Toshiba's partner in a joint venture that happens to make Blu Ray drives) can sell Blu Ray drives at a profit for less than a PS3 but Toshiba cannot?
Fact is there is plenty of profit to be had in the new format. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing models coming left and right from manufacturers. Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Pioneer, Funai, Philips etc. All apparently feel its worth it with some of them already onto their 3rd and 4th generation players.
Why does it even have to be an either / or situation? Toshiba could easily sell an XDE DVD player and BD player. They might even complement each other and pick up sales from both ends of the consumer market. Toshiba is only spiting itself by staying out.
Dr Xym said..."Fact is there is plenty of profit to be had in the new (BR) format."
Fact? Can you produce some links for that ballsy statement?
The "facts" are that volume sales is the major way to drive profits in a crowded market place and stand alone players do not sell in any significant volumes at all. Manufacturers will often produce a product that looses money in the early part of it's cycle as the volume reduces costs and the profit is made later on.
Certainly sony promised the world to all the BR producers, but at this stage all anyone has seen is an atlas, and I would guess, considering sony has 90% of the market and so far lost well over 3 $billion, that no one has made a nickel from BR yet.
Profit will be derived if and when the market gains some serious traction, that's what keeps the manufacturers in bed short term, but I would guess there must be some very nervous people in the BR camp.
I'm with squiggles, Tosh will make money out of this, no question about that, and if and when BR ever takes off Tosh can re evaluate it's stance then, in the mean time, watch and wait, this BR saga isn't over yet.
Samsung is highly unlikely to be making a profit on its Blu-ray players if Sony isn't either. It's in there (a) to keep its hand in, (b) because it hopes to make a profit over-all on the entire HDTV business, and (c) to get traction for the format with the hope that sales of standalone Blu-ray burners et al will eventually make up for the losses on players made today. Without Blu-ray or HD DVD, HDTV's advantages - especially the higher end sets - are less obvious to consumers.
Samsung can afford to take the hit and can afford to pay hundreds of millions to build new plant and built up inventory. Toshiba can't. Toshiba's already a billion on the hole with HD DVD. Toshiba has no good reason to waste more billions on a technology whose future is even less certain than HD DVD's appeared to be.
Pull yourself out of dreamland DrXym: Simply because you LIKE Blu-ray doesn't make it profitable. Simply because hardware manufacturers are backing it right now doesn't mean they're making money directly from it right now. Long term, who knows? If Blu-ray takes off, then there's the chance money can be made from it before reliable, open, downloads make the format obsolete. Indeed, with the technology established, it's quite possible Blu-ray has a ten year minimum lifespan as a data back-up technology.
But it's not profitable today. Sony is hemorrhaging cash. Everyone else has yet to see a return on their investment. Anyone who cannot produce a profitable player that costs less than the price of a PS3 has no reason to enter the business if they haven't already made substantial investments. Toshiba's not invested a penny in Blu-ray. It has nothing to lose by waiting this one out.
And I'm quite sure that once it becomes possible to make profitable players, should the format achieve traction, Toshiba will be out there with everyone else. In the mean time, they have every right to concentrate on returning to profitability. Engadget's Blurons make for lousy armchair CEOs when they insist that Toshiba should make equipment they'll refuse to buy on principle anyway, that cannot possibly make Toshiba a profit, solely because they want to see Toshiba admit that Blu-ray "won" something it hasn't won yet.
Also it seems that this thing is kind of rushed. The user doesn't seem to have much control over the strength of the effects (basically ON or OFF) and what is up with either having deeper blacks or more vibrant colors but not both? Also, doesn't appear to be any way of saving the settings on a per-disc basis so it sound like you need to setup the player manually for each disc.
What, as opposed to say blu ray which 3 years down the track still is an unfinished mish mash of specifications?
A bit less of the "gay" or I'm guessing you will be getting banned.
If introducing upscaling DVD players is so bad, how come Engadget sing the praises of Oppo? Is Oppo wearing blinders for not bringing a BD player to market yet, but constantly releasing upscaling DVD players? You guys need to find people who can contribute actual news and not jaded drivel. What a lame site.
Um, Oppo's FINAL DVD-only player already came out back in March, almost six months ago.
http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/03/11/oppos-dv-983h-upconverting-dvd-deck-marks-the-end-of-the-line/
We already found out that Oppo is working on a Blu-ray player back in February.
http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/02/20/oppo-next-to-create-a-new-blu-ray-player/
There's a big difference between Oppo, who has already recognized the marketplace shift and is moving to serve their customers in the HD arena, and Toshiba who has downgraded from true HD to instead disingenuously promote upconverting DVD as "near HD" quality.
I have no problem with holding Toshiba's feet to the fire over this issue. Of course whenever they start release Blu-ray hardware all will be forgiven, and I'll be interested to see what kind of decks they'll have in the marketplace. It's inevitable that they will.
Is it true that Toshiba has a new DVD player that downgrades from BluRay to 480P then upgrades detail to 1080P with XDE technology?
Imagine that! A consumer electronics company releasing a DVD player! That's not something you'd see Sony doing!
Oh wait, they do.
Whether it's good or bad that Toshiba hasn't released a Blu-ray player is completely irrelevant to whether it's good or bad Toshiba continues to make good DVD players. I'm glad they're making good DVD players. Long may they, and Sony, and everyone else who makes good DVD players, continue to do so.
I don't think it would be a good idea for Toshiba to dip their toes in the Blu-ray business right now. They made a huge loss on HD DVD, and everyone who's involved in Blu-ray is hemorrhaging cash right now trying to produce affordable players. Toshiba needs to get their figures back on track before going into a business that involves investing billions with no sure sign of long term profitability.
BTW Darren Murph, would you actually buy a Toshiba Blu-ray player? I mean, you hate them, so why are you obsessed with them producing a product you clearly would never buy?
The format war is over. The studios know it, the retailers know it, Toshiba knows it, and even the HD DVD fanboys know it. The only people still clinging to it are the Blu-ray fanboys who constantly deride Toshiba at every turn for daring to continue improving DVD upscaling technology.
This product has its niche: HDTV owners for whom Blu-ray is not ready. I know at least three people who fit this description. My aunt, for example, bought a bitchin' 65" DLP and Yamaha 5.1 HTIB last fall. Her non-upscaling DVD/VHS deck looks really crummy on it. But she isn't interested in buzzwords like 1080p or DTS HDMA or HDMI or any of that mess; she just wants to pop in a disc, hit play, sit back and watch a flick. She doesn't even care about widescreen vs. fullscreen or anamorphic vs. non-anamorphic. She gets most of her movies from Redbox or the supermarket checkout lanes. She has Comcast, and has completely chewed up and spat out the On-demand movie menu.
There is no way Blu-ray, with its expensive, buggy players and even more expensive discs, is ready for her. There is no way she's buying a PS3. There's no way she is going to deal with firmware updates, or figuring out the intricacies of lossless audio or BD profiles, or any of that mess. For her, a $150 player that makes ALL her movies look better without making her buy expensive new discs is the PERFECT device.
I predict this Toshiba player will sell quite a lot of units.
I have a feeling your average joe six-pack would prefer a half-ass upscaling DVD player for $70, or even a half-ass upscaling DVD/VHS deck for $100 than a "really good" upscaling deck for $150. The price is too high. In a marketplace where the competition is half the price of these units with customers that are quite price sensitive... Toshiba's going to see a lot of inventory.
do you guys have stock in blu-ray or what? I have and love blu-ray to but I dont see why you have to shit all over anything that comes out thats not blu-ray. there are alot of movies that are not available in HD yet (like HERO for example) that if you can set this thing next to your BD player and upconvert your DVDs to around 960p why wouldnt you?
EngagetHD is owned by Time Warner which made a corporate decision to end the format war by going Blu, so any inference that they are either being told to push Blu, or are sucking up to their masters by doing so is completely out of line. After all these guys are real journalists not a couple of cut and paste wannabes.
Why anyone would post a story about non-HD hardware on a blog dedicated to HD is confusing to say the least.
Webdev: I think this story has a place on the HD blog, because it is supposed to do a great job of upscaling, which means it upsacles to 1080p, which has to do with high def.
Midnight-I agee with you about wanting a machine that can upscale at its best, I could care less if it's Toshiba that makes it or McDonalds. There are many movies in my dvd collection that may take 10 years to get on blu-ray, so I agree with you on that point....but I think most people with high def tv's already have upscaling players, so I think this player will indeed have to be extraordinary compared to previous upscalers for people to replace their already-owned upscaling player with another instead of saving a little more and buying a true high def (blu-ray) player. Just my opinion.
Perfsonally, I am very excited for blu-ray right now. Studios are starting to dig into their catalogs, even back to the older classics, and now that every studio is releasing, with huge titles coming like Planet of the Apes set, Austin Powers, Indiana Jones, Dark Knight, Ironman, Wall_E, Godfather set......and player prices lower than ever and final profile, this should be a very good second half for blu-ray. The only thing that is standing in the way is the terrible economy and the refusal of the movie studios to reduce suggested retail prices for some of the titles ($39.95 for the 1966 Batman movie? Why not 29.95 at most).
So apparently I'm 'teh gay' because I have patience and I understand how the electronics industry works?
Not all of us buy every single new gadget that comes out, especially when it comes to Video technology. Some of us patiently wait and watch the technology until we find a product that fits our needs well, and we anticipate it fitting our needs for hopefully a good long while.
For instance, I researched HDTV's for almost 5 years before I made a purchase. I now have a TV I'm extremely happy with, and should last me for at least 7 years technology-wise. Why did I wait so long? First I wanted to see how the high def formats were going to play out, and eventually decided I wanted 1080p so that when I get a high def player there is a minimum of processing/scaling that occurs. Then when I decided on LCD (and I have my reasons for that), I decided to see how the 120hz thing was shaking out. I then waited for pricing to get sane and made a purchase.
For me BluRay is the same deal. Now that it is the single sane format (downloads are a quagmire at the moment, and probably won't get any better due to studio licensing deals) I'm waiting for the price factor to become sane due to economies of scale. In the mean time I have an Oppo deck that makes for a great image on my TV. As good as actual HD? No. Good enough until a decent sub-$200 BD hits the market? YES!
So I'm kind of curious when being rational, calm, and patient became one of the defining factors of being 'gay.'
Its too little and too late.
If it had a very significantly similar picture quality compared to Blu-Ray, then yes it would be amazing.
Sorry, I have an HD TV and I want my movies to look awesome, not just good.
This player seems like a bargain when compared to some of the more high-end DVD players with expensive scaling chips (Realta's). I wonder how this player would hold up in a side by side with those players.
Then again, the "blind" test they did with a $70 player doesn't bode well for Tosh's super-scaling player.
Personally, I would advise anyone to save their $150 and put it towards a BD player during the holidays. You would be getting TRUE HD, and some decent scaling.
But for someone completely uninterested in going BD, this player might fit the bill for the price.
I am interested to see this in stories, I know it will look nothing like a blu-ray as you cannot make prime rib out of hambergers, but I am interested to see how it upscales compared to my Realta HQV chip in my Denon 3930 dvd player.
I have about 1000 DVDs. Yes, new discs are blu-ray, but I am NOT going to replace those 1000 DVDs. What is so hard to understand about getting the best possible image from existing discs? Sure, I could use my Panasonic BD-30 to upconvert, but, oops, it has crappy upconversion. YMMV, but laughing at this idea seems more a format-war echo than a valid critique.
how come it doesn't say anything about spursengine in the spec's? did they rename spursengine?
That's what I want to know. There is no mention of it anywhere which is mysterious. I'm wondering if this thing even uses Spurs of if they've just equipped a standard upscaler with some modes that apply EE or similar. They'll get flayed alive if they have.
will this have a firmware update enabling it to play HD DVDs? :)
C'mon guys, lets wait and see how this thing does in some official reviews and put it up against the best DVD upscalers, Oppo, Reon/Realta, etc. before damning it to hell. I'm interested to see how it performs. $150 for a top performing upscaling DVD player is not a bad deal, especially if it performs as good as DVD players with the Silicon Optix chips in them.
Here's a quote from Toshiba:
"If you want Blu-ray, go get Blu-ray. This product is meant to improve playback of DVDs," said a Toshiba spokesman.
If Toshiba released a blu-ray player with this xde for $249, they'd mop up...but apparently being obstinate is much more lucrative...
I guess Toshiba just doesn't think that losing money on every purchase of a potential $250 retail blu-ray player is particularly lucrative.
They'd mop up what? The sweat of their accountants? The blood of their CEO after being "talked to" by their shareholders?
I'm beginning to understand the obsession Engadget's Blu-ray obsessives have with Toshiba. You guys really want them to go bankrupt. That's why you want a Toshiba Blu-ray player. It's not that you don't realize that nobody's making a profit on the things right now. It's that you want them to lose more money than Sony has on Hi-def.
A $250 Blu-ray player huh? Why'd you stop at $250? Why not demand Toshiba release a $2.50 Blu-ray player? With an in-built 500W TrueHD 9.1 amplifier too, naturally. And a built-in 60" Plasma screen too. How dare Toshiba release a rival to Blu-ray! They must die upon the unforgiving shores of financial suicide!
Funai's player is currently $268 and will doubtless be $225 or even $200 over Christmas. I see no reason that it couldn't be done although the brand name comfort zone is currently $300-400.
Has iSupply done a cost of parts analysis on BD players lately?
Cheap players (of any type) are a two edged sword.
-If they're too cheap ie, BD profile 1.0 with rediculously slow load times, BD gets a bad rap.
-If they're not cheap enough, Joe Six Pack isn't going to buy one.
So DrXym, Would you recommend the Funai BD player to your friends or family?
Based on comments from people who have bought it, yes I would recommend a Funai. Assuming you don't need analogue outputs and intend to use it with TV speakers or through an AV receiver with audio decoders, it is a perfectly adequate player. People are reporting a couple of minor firmware issues with some disks but nothing major.
http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=48943
Come on Dr Xym, why the hell wouldn't you just recommend a good upscaling DVD player instead of this crappy BR player, lets say oh like a new Toshiba XDE, or knowing your blind fanboyism why not an Oppo or sony even instead?
What is the point of someone paying extra money, who on your description obviously couldn't care less about the home theater experience, to buy a crappy BR player with way more expensive discs, to use it on a shit set up as you describe?
Ridiculous, are they using a CRT or rear projector as well?
Wheres a $250 BD player from Sony, Panasonic and co??
They'll release a Blu-ray player with this tech in it, and when they do, it will be teh hottness.
And you guys will either (a) hate them, and call it crap, or (b) eat crow for all the crap you've shoveled.
Toshiba can't turn Blu-ray over night. They made the decision to take their time rather than throw the entirety of their resources getting it out the door as fast as possible.
Give it a rest. This is a product. It upscales. It does not play Blu-ray. Evaluate it for how well it does what it does, not what it doesn't do (and isn't included in the price).
I have 190 DVDs. If this technology lives up to the hype (at a reasonable price), then my first stand-alone Blu-ray player will be a Toshiba.