OPINION: Upping the ante
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 6/6/2008
JUNE 6 | THE JAPANESE press has been full of speculation in the past week over purported plans by Toshiba to introduce a super up-converting DVD player that surpasses current up-converters and produces images from existing DVDs that are virtually identical to Blu-ray Disc.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
The speculation was touched off by a report in the Daily Yomiuri saying the new players would be released “by the end of the year.” According to the report, the new technology was made possible “by developing a large integrated circuit that can instantly convert images produced in the current format into high-resolution images.”
The report said nothing about pricing, nor about whether Toshiba plans to keep the new technology proprietary or will license it to other manufacturers.
So far, Toshiba has yet to officially confirm the reports, but I’m willing to bet they’re pretty accurate. In March, following Toshiba’s decision to abandon the HD DVD format, CEO Atsutoshi Nishida told the Wall Street Journal, “If you watch standard DVDs on our players, the images are of very high quality because they include an up-converting feature. And we’re going to improve this even more, so that consumers won’t be able to tell the difference from HD DVD images.”
Read the full column on ContentAgenda.com.
