It seems that Toshiba is stopping production on their HD-DVD format. It doesn’t mean the format is dead, but it is pretty much dead if the biggest supporter pulls out. It seems Sony have won this war, and Blu-Ray is the new king. If you have a HD-DVD player and a boat, you have got yourself a very fancy anchor.
For more info, click over to Crave.
Blu-Ray has now got the power of the studio’s behind them, so what do Toshiba and the power of the HD have left to fight back with? They have the power of price drop, with HD-DVD players now available for a neat $US129. Two players will see be affected by the price drop, which are the HD-A3 for $129.99 and the HD-A30 for $179.99.
The value is phenomenal for a nextgen player, and still keeps the free HD-DVD movies you get with it (7 movies all up). It is so cheap that Toshiba would almost be losing money on the player, just to get more market share from the fast growing BR format. It seems that the nextgen movie market, may go the same way as the nextgen console market, with companies losing money per player, to then gain the money back on disk sales.
Lets hope Sony follow suit and drop the price on the PS3. With the cost of making the PS3 down, it would be nice to see the consoles price drop.
For more info, click over to DailyTech.
This Red Vs Blue battle (not the famous, and very hilarious, Halo machina) is getting a little old for me. I am talking about the long winded standard war of HD-DVD (red laser) vs Blu-Ray (purple poker dot laser). The people who are currently losing the battle are the consumer, with not knowing who is going to win, and therefore having to wait to see who can spit the furthest.
The latest turn in the battle is HD-DVD getting 51 GB disks (thanks to Toshiba) approved by the DVD Forum, making them 1 GB bigger then the current biggest Blu-Ray disk. This is achieved through the use of a 3rd layer, making the disks triple layer.
What does this mean to the good people out there? High resolution movies with more features, backup drives with more capacity, bigger computer games and the possibility of massive XBox 360 games. The problem is by the time the disks are affordable, there will most likely be a better standard replacing both of them.
For more info, click over to the Engadget Website.
Looking for a review on the Toshiba HD-A20 HD-DVD player? The people over at Digital Trends have just the review for you. I won’t dive in to deep and ruin a good read for you, but they thought “if you’ve been hesitant to jump into the high-def pool, now’s your chance to get a HD DVD player that won’t let you down”. Sounds like a good deal to me, too bad I’m already on Team Blu-Ray or I would consider it.
For the whole review, spin over to the Digital Trends Website.
Hot on the heals of the new of the Dell XPS SLi notebook, we have the news of the two new Toshiba X205 notebooks. There are 2 models on the table currently, with X205-SLI1 and X205-SLI3 both running dual Nvidia 8600M GT’s (a little less powerful then the 8700’s in the Dell).
As well as the dual video card goodness you also get a Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 (SLi1) to T7500 (SLi3), 2GB DDR2 RAM, 17-inch WXGA+ (SLi1) or WSXGA+ (SLi3), 240GB to 320GB, HD DVD-ROM/DVD SuperMulti, Bluetooth® V2.0 + EDR, wireless 802.11a/g/n and HDMI output port. All this can be your for between $US1999 and $US2499, making it cheaper then the Dell as well.
This is a definate desktop replacement, weighing in at a heavy 9.37 lbs. You won’t be carrying this guy very far, unless you are Heman. Unfortunately they still have that stupid numpad that makes the keyboard tiny. If you are still interested, then you can already order it from the Toshiba website.
For direct links to the notebooks, click here for the SL1 and here for the SL3.