Toshiba's 3rd-gen HD DVD players pack features and don't cost the earth

by Tarinder Sandhu on 3 September 2007, 17:50

Tags: HD-EP35, HD-EP30, Toshiba (TYO:6502)

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The Blu-ray vs. HD DVD battle isn't just a format war, it's a generation war. At IFA2007, Toshiba unveiled a couple of new third-generation standalone HD DVD players.

Leading the way is the HD-EP35, priced at £330 and boasting support for 24fps native frame-rate playback of studio-recorded material. It beats out its £275 companion, the HD-EP30, by adopting a first for Toshiba - high bit-rate 7.1 audio output.

Further, the '35 delivers Deep Colour - via HDMI v1.3 - whereby extra bandwidth is channelled towards higher colour precision (36-bit RGB, usually) for richer and more life-like images.

However, after comparing the output of the two models side-by-side on identical Toshiba LCD TV sets, I clearly need to go to Specsavers - there was little to differentiate them. Perhaps the 30-bit TV sets just aren't capable enough ;).

Both models support 1080p output for HD DVD and upscale to the same resolution for your old DVD collection.

The format war will be won by decreasing cost and increasing availability. In that sense, HD DVD seems to have a slight edge.



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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Posted by greenalien - Wed 12 Sep 2007 10:17
Only worth it if it plays both formats - HD-DVD and BLU-RAY. LG, SONY, NEC and SAMSUNG have all got dual format players available or on the way, and I wouldn't touch a single-format player with a bargepole. During the ‘Betamax vs VHS’ contest, VHS won because of its dominance of the rental tape market, so people bought video recorders that matched the format in which they could get pre-recorded movies - and there just weren't that many Betamax movies available. Early video recorders were expensive - over £1000 in todays equivalent terms - and most people could not afford 2 machines - and dual-format videotape players never happened. Today, there is a similar split between the movie studios support of the 2 HD formats but with the advent of dual-format players I think the ‘Blu-ray vs HD-DVD’ contest will just keep going, with both formats in parallel (until solid state memory eventually takes over in 7 - 10 years!) . It's a different ballgame in the recording market though - Blu-ray has greater capacity and is likely to win hands-down for data storage.
Posted by Funkstar - Wed 12 Sep 2007 13:00
greenalien
blah blah blah
Yes, we know. this has been discussed countless times.

£275 is a really good price for a player. We are almost getting to the stage that it doesn't matter which (if either) format succeeds as consumers don't need to shell out £1000 on the “wrong” player.

Why not just get both? once hey hit £100 - £200 each there isn't a lot of reasons not to do just that.
Posted by shaithis - Wed 12 Sep 2007 13:19
Sony created:
Betamax
MiniDisc
UMD

All failed as mass-market consumer formats.

Toshiba were the main creators of DVD (Sony were developing their own and decided against it at the time “MultiMedia Compact Disc” I believe it was called)

Buying into HD-DVD for £275 seems like a great gamble based on past history :)
Posted by greenalien - Wed 12 Sep 2007 17:31
All failed as mass-market consumer formats

true as far as ‘mass market’ is concerned, but Betamax was the pre-eminent pro broadcast recording format for nearly 2 decades, until digital video replaced it, and was also the medium of choice for the first professional studio digital audio mastering via the F1 PCM conversion box; furthermore, Video 8 - the most succesful mass-market analogue camcorder format - was just Betamax scaled down; so I think Sony had the last laugh with that one!
Posted by Funkstar - Wed 12 Sep 2007 18:19
I can't remember the name of Sony's new pro digital format, but i think it is based on BluRay and is extremely good from the little i've read. The likelyhood is it will become an industry standard over time.

Of course it does help that Sony are pretty domenant in that area. Well at least they were 6 or 7 years ago when i was speaking to camera men and producers etc.