Toshiba To Fight Blu-ray Again With The XD-E500 DVD Player

Toshiba, obviously still upset about HD DVD's defeat at the hands of Blu-ray, has decided not to support the rival high-def format and do something completely different. In what may in the future be known as the best or the worst attempt at market redemption in the history of home theater electronics, Toshiba has chosen to support...DVD. With a twist of course.

Yesterday Toshiba unveiled upon the world the XD-E500, a DVD player featuring the company's proprietary eXtended Detail Enhancement (XDE) technology. XDE, an upconverting technology with a fancy name, take take plain ol' 480i standard def picture and upscale it to full HD 1080p. What's different about XDE though, is that users have the option of choosing picture mode settings-Sharp, Color, and Contrast-to further improve the picture quality depending on the type of video being viewed.

The XD-E500 will ship this month, priced at $149.99, and in addition to XDE features HDMI-CEC, DivX and JPEG compatibility, as well as MP3 and WMA playback. While at first glance this seems like a laughable move by Toshiba, consumers so far look to be perfectly content with upscaled DVD's given the hefty expense of Blu-ray players and discs. For the week ending August 10, the Blu-ray Statistics News Log reports that Blu-ray disc sales only held in a 7% market share in optical disc sales, a far cry from DVD's 93% chunk of the market.

So what do you think-did Toshiba make the right choose by sticking with DVD?

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