Toshiba to launch Blu-ray player by end of year

Posted by Katherine Hannaford on Sun 19 Jul 2009

Sharpen your swords soldiers, the format war looks set to return.

They promised it would never happen, yet 17 months after Toshiba bowed out of the hi-def format wars, the Japanese company has announced plans to launch a Blu-ray player by the end of the year.

- T3's group test of six new Blu-ray players

A report in the Daily Yomiuri newspaper is claiming that Toshiba is planning a Blu-ray/DVD combo player along with a Blu-ray recorder, the later poised to launch only in Japan.

Since giving up on HD DVD when all looked lost at the beginning of 2008, Toshiba’s been throwing its weight behind upscaling TVs and DVD players under the name of Resolution+, boasting that their cell-processor upscales DVDs to 1080p. Last June, when Toshiba formally announced it would be endorsing upscaling as its format of choice, Emily Shirley, the head of product marketing at Toshiba Europe sniped at the Blu-ray Disc Association, claiming "Blu-ray is only a storage medium". Is it time for her to eat her words?

Whilst the stubborn company has always denied the possibility of embracing the Blu-ray format, the upscaling technology was seen as a smart move at targeting the millions of consumers who already owned dozens of DVDs, and had no wish to upgrade to an expensive player, replacing their catalogue of films in a new format.

Link: Toshiba (via TechRadar and Daily Yomiuri)

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