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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
ChiWax @ May 30th 2008 3:37PM
How lame is it when so many DVDs are priced under 10 bux? Some people would contend that buying "Juno" or "27 Dresses" for more than 20 bux is lame....Q
Raptor007 @ May 30th 2008 3:42PM
True, but why would you want Toshiba's new DVD player when your Blu-ray player can already play those cheap DVDs?
Nfinity @ May 30th 2008 4:01PM
and that's totally up to you. These players will be most likely below $200, will super-upscale to as close as you can get to real HD from regular DVDs.
To say that it's a lame or bad technology, especially when it can be integrated in TVs alone so you don't even need a special player, the TV will do the job for you, is to be kind of narrow minded. Don't you think?
Mikael.H @ May 31st 2008 6:15AM
I think that Toshiba is simply responding to the bad marketing job the BD team is conducting in making BD mainstream. They are probably agreeing that this technology will not live long enough to make any good bucks off.
When comparing the complete aspects, DVD is not nearly as inferior to Blu-ray as VHS was to DVD so there might not be reason enough to believe that we will have the same takeover process.
Toshiba sees that BD are not trying hard enough lowering prices and releasing new more stable players, that they see a window of opportunity. Maybe...
Also prices of BD-R media and burners are dropping fast so the BD bootleg market could be just around the corner. One more very heavy blow to an already bleeding marketing plan.
Just my point of view. /Mike
squiggleslash @ May 31st 2008 11:43AM
Really not sure what the hate-on Engadget has for Toshiba here, nor why this is portrayed as a bad thing.
Here's the deal. This is good news because it's an enhancement technology for DVD. The write-up done by a journalist independent of Toshiba is portraying it as something it's not - Toshiba's attempt to produce a "Blu-ray rival". This is just a significant advancement in upscaling DVD players.
Toshiba is not doing this to "keep DVD alive" or "destroy Blu-ray". Blu-ray's dead anyway, it's just a minority of techies and the industry itself that can't see that.
Blu-ray is expensive and will be for the next few years. It's lacking in significant advantages over DVD, it has one significant disadvantage (BD+ - a technology that guarantees you will never be able to buy an arbitrary BD disk and be able to assume your player will play it) that thus far Blu-ray's backers refuse to do anything about, and nobody's even producing BD players that aren't going to be obsolete in a year with the exception of one games console that doesn't fit easily into an AV stack.
If BD was the only HD player around for the forseeable future, a significant number of people might have adopted it through desperation, but HD on-demand is already here, Apple and others are doing it, and if Netflix can prove its business model is viable (rentals don't cut it for everyone, they don't me), then, well, which would you have? An over-priced, unreliable, device that can only play disks you've bought, or something that has instant access to every movie ever made, with no charges beyond the broadband connection you're already paying for and a fixed monthly charge for VoD service?
Think about that. I'm not talking about online rentals. I'm talking about paying $20 a month on top of your broadband subscription, and being able to watch any movies you want, as often as you want. Only Pirate Bay users have anything approaching that today, but this'll "just work" and will not require you have the world's biggest hard disk and the patience of a saint. Netflix are already going there, they're just SD at the moment.
Meanwhile everyone Blu-ray player supports DVD and it's improbable that anyone will ever produce a player only capable of playing blue-laser media. From Toshiba's point of view, they get the same royalties on every BD player sold that they get with DVD players, and that's not going to change for at least ten more years.
Toshiba and Sony both screwed up. Sony has produced an HD-video disk technology that will never be market viable. Toshiba failed to promote their technology enough to displace Sony's, and arguably didn't make it advanced enough to be a part of the oncoming VoD revolution, though as a framework it certainly had room to grow in that direction.
What Toshiba's done here is recognize the inevitable. It's not getting involved in Blu-ray, and will not unless Blu-ray actually defies gravity and takes off. In the mean time, it's improving a product line that will sell well for the foreseeable future with a relatively cheap software upgrade.
They're not doing this to some-how prolong the life of DVD, and they're not doing this to "stick it" to Blu-ray. They're doing this to make money. Easy money. What Engadget and the Playstation 3 fanbois who post here want them to do doesn't make any financial sense at all. You're essentially saying the right course for a consumer electronics company is to freeze all development of a best-selling technology, refuse to produce the best product they can, and instead jump into a technology that's expensive and unlikely to be a success.
Sintek @ Jun 17th 2008 11:31PM
Yeeaa Squigle I see you obviously dont work in the retail world or have any contact with Toshiba reps or Sony rep.
You saying that BD has no where to go? what! this is the same way DVD started slow and steady. this is an infant technology to the public. when dvd came out the prices where the same as BD is now..
I remeber buying a Pioneer DVD player for $449 CND in 1998 i think it was. and movies were $39 CND.
People have a curious fashion about them that having a physical tangable item to keep there movies is what they have to have and not just anything tangable it has to be the right size too.. why do you think they haven't brought out Movies on SD cards? it would be ALOT cheaper to load a 8Gb flash card with an HD video than it is to make DVD's. its because no one would want to have a collection on flash card.. i wouldn't thats for sure..
Anyway you should actually get out in the world before saying a technology isn't viable or going anywhere, last time I checked Bestbuy and the video rental stores have doubled the BD shelves in BD titles since HD-DVD went away.