Toshiba to produce Blu-ray Disc Player

Posted the news from PC World about this on  Monday at the CES 2010 thread. Should be a very interesting Toshiba press conference in Las Vegas in January...

 It's officially official.  Hitting all the news wires today!

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iEIzDh7j2jM9lXEuW7TFxLWKmrlQD9A01QP80

http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2009_08/pr1001.htm

Great news!
It should be able to play, uhm, other discs as well!


Cees

You mean multi-format with HDDVD?

Yes. They won't have to pay additional patent fees and it could help solving some problems for a lot of people.


Cees

(typo corrected)
Edited by Cees Alons - 8/17/2009 at 09:47 am GMT

Possibly it'd be the best dual-format player around? I wonder how much internal memory it'd have.

They wouldn't have to pay royalty fees, but would the manufacturing process incur any extra costs to include HD DVD in the player? Differences in the laser and associated components, maybe?

Not sure I would even consider another Toshiba product in my home theater?  While I still have my Toshiba HD-DVD player and have no plans to get rid of it anytime soon.  I just do think I want a Toshiba Bluray player, I would be more likely to spend my cash with Pioneer, Denon or even Panasonic than with Toshiba.  And I just do not see Toshiba putting out a great Bluray player. 

Why not? I have owned two Toshiba SD players which never gave me any problems. One of them (the SD-5109) is still in use in my home today and has never failed. It has even outlasted friends' Pioneer, Sony, Panasonic, Yamaha, Marantz and Denon players. I also have a first-run HD-A1 which works perfectly. I may be looking at a new BD player for my HT in the spring and if Toshiba has a well endowed unit (insert laugh here), I would definitely consider buying it, especially if they were to throw in HD-DVD capability. I could be purple in both the main HT and bedroom HT.

I've seen the player's specs, and it's nothing to shout about. Looks like a re-badge of one of the mass-produced Chinese machines. No fancy video processing (like the XA2) and no XDE. No HD DVD support. In fact, nothing much to mention other than the standard feature set of a Profile 2.0 machine. 

It also suffers from one of the cardinal sins of CD/DVD/Blu-ray player product design: a manually operated flip-down front panel covering the disc tray, and a remote control with an eject button. A recipe for a broken... something.

I also own an Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD player and while it has a nice picture it locks up to often for my liking.  Even with firmware updates I wouldn't call the HD-A1 the most reliable player out there.  I have just not been that impressed with Toshiba over all the past 5 years.  I want to elevate the level of my home theater and I do not feel that Toshiba would help me do that. 

I think I only had one player lockup with my HD-A1 and that was with the first or second firmware release.

(Looks like you need to dust there, Dave! )

In all fairness that was first gen.  If I remember it actually has an Intel P3 inside.  First gen BD players left a lot to be desired too.  Besides, from what I hear on the grapevine it is just a re-badged BD player from another manufacturer.....

Quote:

You are right it could use some dusting !