Toshiba Applies to Join Blu-ray Disc Association

[admin_exported]

This just in - more on this later today...after backing HD-DVD, then snubbing BD in January...Toshiba have changed their mind.

Toshiba Applies to Join Blu-ray Disc Association

Tokyo--Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) announced today that the company has applied for membership of the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) and plans to introduce products that support the Blu-ray format.

 

As a market leader in digital technologies, Toshiba provides a wide range of advanced digital products, such as DVD recorders and players, HDTVs and notebook PCs that support a wide range of storage devices, including hard disk drives (HDD), DVD, and SD Cards.

In light of recent growth in digital devices supporting the Blu-ray format, combined with market demand from consumers and retailers alike, Toshiba has decided to join the BDA.

Toshiba aims to introduce digital products that support the Blu-ray format, including BD players and notebook PCs integrating BD drives, in the course of this year. Details of the products, including the timing of regional launches, are now under consideration. 

 

[Andy Clough]

News story just posted here.

 

[Andrew Everard]

Would be amusing if it got blackballed...

 

[Clare Newsome]

...or at least being made to wait for ages to be approved, while a screen with a spinning disc logo just keeps saying 'Loading...'

But seriously...Given Toshiba's excellent pedigree in affordable DVD players, this move could shake up the budget Blu-ray market nicely.

 

[Anonymous]

Hopefully the normal market pressures will come to bear - more suppliers = more competition = lower prices/more/better functionality. #Win

 

[Anonymous]

This is great news as kevol said! More competition, better products at lower prices, and just before christmas which could be a nice little bonus for us all

 

[Tom Moreno]

Absolutely agree with the previous two posts. Even if these budget products aren't what you're looking for to complement a high-spec system, better competition and lower prices at the lower end of the market will push adoption rates and feed us with more and more software support from the studios. Software prices are steadily falling to reasonable range considering the age of the format, but the more people who buy a shiny new BD deck at the near £100 as players start to hit it, the more the price of software will continue to fall.

 

[Garth Man]

http://www.home-entertainment.toshiba.co.uk/News-Reviews/DVD/DVDNews/Toshiba-Applies-to-Join-Blu-ray-Disc-Association/

Shame really, their format sooooo should of won, not that i bought a HD player

 

[Andrew Everard]

Garth Man:not that i bought a HD player

Ah, so it was your fault, then...

 

[Garth Man]

I do lay awake at night with that thought polluting me.....

Lets face it, in terms of bluray performance and features, they have just passed or caught up with Toshibas players in my view anyway....

 

[Tom Moreno]

Garth Man:
http://www.home-entertainment.toshiba.co.uk/News-Reviews/DVD/DVDNews/Toshiba-Applies-to-Join-Blu-ray-Disc-Association/

Shame really, their format sooooo should of won, not that i bought a HD player

Not sure I totally agree with you on that one. I have the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox and had quite a few discs (they're almost all replaced and sold off on ebay now) and, to be honest, I found that picture quality was identical between the two but the lack of hi-res PCM and DTS-HD MA audio (along with the larger disc size of BD that promoted using these formats) meant that the BD version sounded better. But the biggest difference to me was that HD-DVD's long insistence to migrate as many aspects of DVD to an HD disc meant that they continued to use the same depth of focus on the data layers of their discs that was used by DVD while BD changed this and added their Super-hard coating stuff to it, and the end result was that HD-DVDs scratched really easily. And a fairly innocuous scratch that would never trouble an old-fashioned DVD player would strike down an HD-DVD's playback because of the significantly smaller data pit size. This was especially noticeable with rental HD-DVDs that, upon inspection looked to be ok, but 1 out of 4 would play all the way through without issue, and a resultant inspection would reveal a microscopic scratch. In stark contrast, the BDs I frequently rent from Lovefilm have very rarely had any problems. Only one has been unreadable and I have yet to find one that is actually scratched, although almost all have grubby thumbprints but I reckon this is down to the PS3's lovely slot-load mechanism. Don't get me wrong I was happy to have HD-DVD to watch HD films on my system at a great entry price thanks to the 360's add-on drive, but after buying a BD deck and switching over I do think that Blu-ray has proven to be a better engineered format.

Anyhow that's just my 2 cents.

 

[Garth Man]

each to their own I suppose

But i did find the Xbox HD player to be not as good as one of their last few players in terms of the performance for DVD and HD

Like the HD-EP30/35 or the HD-XE1

The DVD upscaling itself was fantastic, and HD performance. Much better than teh crop of Bluray players that were out at that time.

 

[Tom Moreno]

Garth Man:
each to their own I suppose

But i did find the Xbox HD player to be not as good as one of their last few players in terms of the performance for DVD and HD

Like the HD-EP30/35 or the HD-XE1

The DVD upscaling itself was fantastic, and HD performance. Much better than teh crop of Bluray players that were out at that time.



I don't think there's any question that the players that Tosh knocked out while the war was raging were definitely bettering the vast majority of the Blu couterparts and the subsidised pricing of those decks made them an absolute steal. But in retrospect one has to reckon that they were working very hard to gloss over the pitfalls of the disc format itself. At the end of the day, as it was in the DVD v DIVX format war all those years ago, the war was always going to be won by whoever had the most studios backing it. It doesn't matter what price your player costs or really any of the specs or quality of the hardware, content is king. And with the number of studios that were Blu-exclusive the scales were tipped from the outset.

 

[Garth Man]

Completly agree mate

Still think all this investment in Bluray is a big gamble as film streaming/downloading is becoming ever so more poplular

Can 't see if bluray will be as big as DVD, but time will tell

 

[ElectroMan]

Tom Moreno:
In stark contrast, the BDs I frequently rent from Lovefilm have very rarely had any problems. Only one has been unreadable and I have yet to find one that is actually scratched, although almost all have grubby thumbprints but I reckon this is down to the PS3's lovely slot-load mechanism.

In my experience most rental discs have grubby thumbprints - down to sloppy handling irrespective of slot loading or not!

 

[Tom Moreno]

ElectroMan:Tom Moreno:
In stark contrast, the BDs I frequently rent from Lovefilm have very rarely had any problems. Only one has been unreadable and I have yet to find one that is actually scratched, although almost all have grubby thumbprints but I reckon this is down to the PS3's lovely slot-load mechanism.

In my experience most rental discs have grubby thumbprints - down to sloppy handling irrespective of slot loading or not!

True, but the slot load doesn't help. A disc in a tray is at least in the right position to be picked up by the outer and inner edges, the slot makes grabbing the disc from the top and bottom the easiest form of handling. If I remember correctly the PS3 even has a bit of a hold on the disc which makes it that little bit harder to remove holding the edges.