Toshiba got its hindquarters handed to it in the HD DVD / Blu-ray format war, and that had to sting. But while all of the other HD DVD backers have sucked it up and moved on to embrace Blu-ray (even Microsoft has announced they’re adding native Blu-ray support to Windows, I hear hell had a run on ice skates), Toshiba just seems to have dug in their heels and is acting like Blu-ray doesn’t exist. If HD DVD couldn’t win, fine, then they’ll just put out high end DVD players. I didn’t know multinational corporations could be so Emo.

So today Toshiba dropped a press release entitledToshiba ‘Breathes New Life’ Into DVD with XDE™ Technology. XDE stands for eXtended Detail Enhancement, which to me sounds like nothing more than upscaling with fancy edge enhancement and color contrast adjustment. Frankly it sounds like crap to me, based on the press release.

XDE Flexibility

In addition to upconversion from 480i/p to 1080p, XDE technology offers consumers the ability to customize their viewing experience to their liking with its picture mode settings. With these three selectable settings — Sharp, Color and Contrast — users can get the most out of their DVD movie-viewing experience on their terms.

– Sharp Mode offers improved detail enhancement that is one step closer to high definition. Edges are sharper and details in movies are more visible. Unlike traditional sharpness control, XDE technology analyzes the entire picture and adds edge enhancement precisely where it’s needed.

– Color Mode makes the colors of nature stand out with improved richness. Blues and greens are more vivid and lifelike. Color Mode combines the improvement in color with the detail enhancement of Sharp Mode and is ideal for outdoor scenes.

– Contrast Mode is designed to make darker scenes or foregrounds more clearly visible without the typical “washing out” that can occur with traditional contrast adjustment. Recommended for dark scenes where detail may be difficult to notice, Contrast Mode is also combined with Sharp Mode to provide a clearer viewing experience.

So ‘Sharp Mode’ cranks up the edge enhancement. But too much edge enhancement is one of the most common complaints videophiles have about many titles. This is the kind of cheap trick studios use to try to make an image ‘pop’, but it is unnatural. And now your DVD player can do it to all of your discs. Yay?

‘Color Mode’ sounds like it just tweaks the color palette to favor blues and greens, which can certainly make an image seem more vivid, but artificially so. This is the same kind of trick box stores use to make images on HDTVs look more striking on the wall of screens. And also why the first thing you should do is calibrate your TV, because the settings it comes with are great for selling the set in the store, but not for accurate color reproduction at home.

And ‘Contrast Mode’ cranks up the contrast. But if the contrast isn’t there in the source material, then it must be artificially boosting and/or suppressing some of the picture to increase the contrast. It all sounds like a high-tech, fancy way of doing what people used to do with the color, tint, and contrast knobs on old TVs – and the menus that replaced them on new TVs. This doesn’t sound so much like ‘breathing new life’ into DVD as it does ‘putting DVD in an iron lung’.

You know what these remind me of? Those silly audio modes most receivers have. You know, like ‘Concert Hall’? The settings that mess with the sound to supposedly recreate the feeling of a different space, but in reality are about as close the the real thing as Froot Loops cereal is to real fruit. The snozberries taste just like snozberries!

Sure, I’m just basing this off their press release and I haven’t seen it for myself. But even if they’ve been remarkably clever about the technology, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re just upscaling DVDs and tweaking the picture to try to make it look better. They’re just putting lipstick on a pig compared to real HD media like Blu-ray. No matter how you slice it, the best DVD can provide is one-sixth the raw pixel count as Blu-ray. And no matter how clever your algorithms are to interpolate the data, you just can’t recreate what isn’t there to start with. You can never start with a 480p source and upscale it to 1080p and match a native 1080p source.

So who is going to buy XDE players? People with extensive existing libraries of DVD you say? I have many hundreds of DVDs myself. But Toshiba is selling their XD-E500 1080p/24fps Upconverting DVD player, their first XDE-equipped player, for $149.99. Now, it also handles MP3 and WMA music playback, JPEG display, and is DivX certified, which is all well and good. But you can get a non-XDE player with all of those features (1080p24 upscaling, MP3/WMA, JPEG, DivX), for $50-$60. I myself have a Philips unit I picked up a while back from Amazon for around $60 which has those features, plus known codes to enable region free playback, and it handles NTSC< ->PAL. The Toshiba is unlikely to have either of those features. So is XDE worth the extra $90-$100? Or even $50 if the player is that much cheaper online? Will XDE and the Toshiba logo on the box convince people to pay double what they can get another unit for?

I doubt it will for the majority of users. Any improvement can only be just so good, and you’d need a good HDTV to really get the full benefit. And that’s after you manage to educate users on just what XDE is. When someone in standing in their local Best Buy, comparing units on a shelf, and the only differences are the brand, the price, and that the Toshiba has ‘XDE’, you’ve got an uphill battle on your hands to educate the user on what XDE is and why they want it.

So you’re really after users who are willing to spend more for a (supposedly) better quality picture. But then the users most likely to be willing to shell out more for such improvements are the very same group most likely to be willing to shell out for a Blu-ray deck. Entry level, current model decks are under $300 now, closer to $250 in some cases. And existing stocks of last generation units can be had for less than that. Even some of the best of the current models, with bells and whistles like BD-Live, are between $350-$400. And those prices are falling as supply and competition both increase, and component costs decrease. Entry level units should be under $200 by the holidays, with some well-equipped units under $300.

So where does XDE fit? Users who are just slightly more demanding than a non-XDE DVD player, but not demanding enough to go for even a low-end Blu-ray deck? All Blu-ray decks are also DVD players, all upscaling as far as I’m aware, most quite good at it, some very, very good. Once a person is willing to spend more money on the player, beyond the glut of sub-$100 upscaling players, they’ve already taken the first step toward being willing to make the jump to Blu-ray. It seems like XDE is there just to try to catch those who don’t quite jump high enough to clear the bar. I can’t believe that’s a big market.

The DVD player market is a commodity market now, even for nice upscaling players. It is getting such that there are fairly decent DVD players that cost less than some new release DVDs. Buy a movie, get a free player. That’s a joke, but sometimes it seems like that’s the next step. Toshiba is trying to be the odd man out, and they seem to think XDE will distinguish them from the hordes of commodity players. Enough that users will pay their higher prices. I don’t think it is going to be a big win for them.

Toshiba’s HD DVD decks were very nice units with some great features. They could easily have used the same platform as the basis for a Blu-ray player development. And now is the time (well, six months ago was the time) to get some nice BD players out and make revenue on them. In 2009 when the wave of Chinese BD players hits, there will be a lot of downward pressure on player pricing, making the market less attractive to ‘premium’ brands like Toshiba. That happened in the DVD market years ago. Instead of chasing yesterday’s market long after it has been commoditized, Toshiba needs to go after the marker’s of today and tomorrow, where the margins are higher and competition is lower. I really think it is just their corporate pride and stubbornness which keeps them from embracing Blu-ray.

The full press release:
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