Acknowledging that their new eXtended Detail Enhancement (XDE) tech does not actually replace a true HD source like HD DVD or Blu-ray, Toshiba is hoping to attract all those consumers who are mostly satisfied with their HDTVs and DVDs by offering the XD-E500 up-converting DVD player today.

The new XD-E500 retails for $149 (although it debuts for $179 today at Amazon) and offers DVD up-scaling that’s superior to what’s been offered in their own lower-end models, and probably from other up-scaling DVD players.

The XDE player offers a choice of three video enhancements: (1) sharp for edge detail (2) rich color (3) more contrast, of which you can select two to be active at any time. I’m sure forthcoming articles and interviews will reveal why you can only select two at a time, and we’ll be on the lookout for the inevitable comparisons against the highly vaunted Oppo up-converting DVD players, as well as true HD media.

Toshiba’s website for the new player, http://www.toshibaxde.com hasn’t gone live yet so we don’t really have a lot of pictures to show from the sales pitch, but you can see some before/after enhancement shots over at Amazon.

Toshiba’s product description page states the following:

This product does not play HD DVD or Blu-ray discs. It upconverts standard definition (480p) DVD content to HD (720p, 1080i or 1080p) to match the resolution of your HD display. Although near the picture quality, it does not produce or output native HD video content.

In other words, it’s not “The Look and Sound of Perfect” but just “Good Enough.” I’m curious to see whether “good enough” and “near HD” take a hold in the marketplace. I know that you and I are probably not amongst that crowd of buyers, but I’m sure you’ve got at least a few acquaintances who think a big screen is all it takes to have a great home theater.

Now that the format war is over, some HD DVD owners are seeking out combo players as a way to keep their HD DVD collections viable while they transition to Blu-ray. If you’re in this group, then you may need to pay closer attention to pricing and availability of these models in the near future as Samsung and LG have both announced that the end is near for these machines.

In statements to The Korea Times, a Samsung spokesperson revealed that they already stopped making these units in February, and an LG representative said they’ll stop their dual-format efforts in the second half of the year.

Many months ago, people advised that purchasing a combo HD DVD and Blu-ray player would be a safe way to avoid getting stung too badly in the format war. The thinking was that you’d have a single player that could handle whichever of the disc formats eventually won, and always have the option to pick and choose the best discs in the formats that they happened to come out in.

One of the biggest problems with this approach was that buying a combo player would cost more than buying two players, one for each format. And in the beginning, the LG players only partially met the full HD DVD spec because they left out any web-enabled features.

In the last couple of months, prices on these players have come down quite a bit, and the more recent LG player model is now fully compliant with the HD DVD specifications. Except for the fact that they’re not going to be upgradeable to the latest Blu-ray spec, buying one of these machines is finally a more palatable decision.

If all you’re really looking for is a back-up machine to ensure that your HD DVD collection doesn’t go to waste, then you might want to consider the current sale at TigerDirect (who also now run CompUSA), where you can get an HD-A3 plus four movies for only $80. Two of the four movies are The Bourne Identity and 300, which already come with the player, and TigerDirect is throwing in Apollo 13 and Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift.

Besides that deal, you can also find many used players on eBay and Craigslist, or perhaps an “open-box” unit at an electronics store.

• HD-A3 Player Bundle at TigerDirect.com
• Samsung BD-UP5000 Dual-format player at Amazon.com
• LG BH200 Super Blu Combo Player at Amazon.com
• Samsung, LG End Combo HD DVD Player Line at The Korea Times

According to a story at Engadget, lucky shoppers in Ireland can pick up Xbox 360 HD DVD players for the equivalent of just under $16 at stores like GameStop. Kotaku had reported earlier that the drives were going for twice that price in the US, but those were refurbished units.

Irish shoppers can also take advantage of the big sales at British DVD sites such as dvd.co.uk who are selling HD DVD titles, including American Gangster, for as little as £6.95, which is about USD $14 (shipping to the USA isn’t too expensive either). If you’ve been following this site recently, then you’ll know that prices from Australian stores have also been really great.

The format war may have ended, but these kinds of prices are compelling and an inexpensive way to get some good mileage from your HDTV and HD DVD. Blu-ray players start around $399 and since the movies aren’t on fire sales, the pricing on most of them ends up being a lot higher. It makes even more sense for existing HD DVD owners to get in on these sales than for someone new starting out with HD DVD. Regardless, these sales are appealing to people faced with tightening entertainment budgets in the months ahead.

• Engadget story
• dvd.co.uk sale (British site)
• EzDvd clearance sale on HD DVD (Australian site)
• Dvdcrave has lots of HD DVD titles under USD $9 (Australian site)

UPDATE: Roger mentioned in the comments that www.HMV.co.uk and zavvi.co.uk also have super deals like American Gangster for £4.99 (about US $10, but factor in shipping to the US to see if the deal is worth it).

There’s a saying that the leader in any race has a big target on his back. Any new leader to emerge inherits that target and, in some kinds of races, even the observers can take their shots.

This is certainly the case with Blu-ray right now where the last couple of weeks have seen two separate reports about temporary and/or prolonged gloom.

The first shot at the new leader was from research firm, ABI, who said that demand for Blu-ray players will be low until those players hit the $200 mark. This is common knowledge if you’ve been following the format war, and as an HD DVD owner, you may already fall into this customer profile. The prospect of starting over or transitioning to the other format is made less palatable when you consider how much more expensive it’s going to be to get the player in the first place. If Blu-ray players were far less expensive, then more of us in the HD DVD crowd would gone purple and sooner.

Getting back to the ABI report, they think it’s not going to be until sometime in 2009 that Blu-ray really picks up steam and wider adoption.

The more recent shot at Blu-ray comes from NPD research numbers and a story that’s picked up a lot of momentum all over the web, suggesting that Sony’s victory lap for winning the format war is a short one. Recent sales tracking data from the NPD group showed a significant drop in standalone Blu-ray player sales in the last few months, with a big 40% dip in February.

If the format war was still going strong, we’d expect Team Blu to come back and point to strong PS3 sales and say that overall adoption of machines with Blu-ray drives in them is still very healthy — and they’d be right. This would be followed by the HD DVD camp sticking to their guns about standalone player sales being a better indicator of high-def movie adoption, and they’d also be right. Team Blu would also come back (and they have) to point out that sales of all kinds of things are usually low following all the big shopping that happens at Christmas time.

Another explanation given for the weakness in Blu-ray player sales is that there’s a supply problem, and that the small numbers are actually a reflection of stores not having enough in stock, and not so much that people aren’t interested. This could be true. It’s the same explanation given for why Xbox 360 sales were a little soft in those last few months too.

And if I recall, there were also a lot of headlines in March about a general increase in the pricing on Blu-ray players. While the MSRP did not change, discounts and deals were rare. Either way, it wasn’t the sort of news that drives customers to stores.

Many HD DVD owners find a good reason to smirk at these recent developments because it’s a relief to finally hear some bad news that’s not about their own format. Instead of taking pot-shots at HD DVD, reporters and analysts now focus all of their scrutiny and nastiness on the new target bearer.

• Blu-ray: The Future Has Been Delayed at the New York Times

I was just saying in yesterday’s post that there’s still some sense in buying certain movies on HD DVD since Universal’s Blu-ray plans for this year are largely about releasing new movies, and just barely getting caught up on the titles that came out on HD DVD, while Paramount had not even said how they and Dreamworks would be going back to Blu. Well, we have to wonder no more about Par’s plans.

On Tuesday, Paramount announced a strategy similar to Universal’s about Blu-ray releases for the year. It consists mainly of putting out new titles “day and date” (meaning they come out the same time as) with their DVD versions, and then getting caught up on catalog titles a little more slowly. They’ll kick off their re-entry to Blu-ray a few weeks from now on May 20 with Bee Movie, Face/Off and Next.

These will be followed up by recent movies such as Cloverfield and There Will Be Blood on June 3, and Spiderwick Chronicles on June 24, while August brings No Country for Old Men. Paramount did not disclose any further release plans for the rest of the year, but it’s a good bet that all of the significant new movies will come out a few months after their theatrical runs.

This means that Michael Bay and the many legions of his fans, as well as a few dozen Blu-ray owners, will apparently have to wait a little longer to see Transformers on Paramount’s Blu-ray release slate. Likewise, many Trekkies will have to wait and see when the first and second seasons of the original series discs come out in high-def.

For at least the next few months, and maybe some more after that, HD DVD is still the only way to enjoy certain movies from Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and many other studios, because their high-def disc strategy going forward prioritizes new movies over catching up on catalog titles. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to wait a year or longer for some of your HD DVD favorites to come out on Blu, most likely at full-price, or get them now at whatever discounts you can find.

UPDATE: It looks like some of the Blu-ray titles that had been taken off shelves when Paramount went HD DVD-exclusive last year will be returning to shelves on May 20, including Blades of Glory, Babel, Aeon Flux, The Warriors, and Black Snake Moan.

The most recent news item for Toshiba and HD DVD is that their first HD DVD player, the HD-A1 which made its debut in April of 2006, just got a firmware 3.0 update. No word just yet on updates for the later models.

A pseudo-news item about a Toshiba Blu-ray machine came up a few days ago when it was revealed that their Brazilian unit was offering a home theater PC (HTPC) sporting a combo HD DVD/Blu-ray drive. Writers who are less familiar with covering HD DVD and Blu-ray were quick to suggest that this was Toshiba’s attempt at getting into Blu-ray. Technically, this is a Toshiba product and it does do Blu-ray, so it’s not like these reporters were lying. However, it’s not a mainstream player from the big Toshiba mothership, and in the end there’s no reason to expect this Brazilian product at Best Buy, Circuit City or Amazon any time soon.

In early March, Toshiba put a final number on what they’d be writing off as they got out of the HD DVD business. Now that those documents are filed, this amount made news again and you might have read that Toshiba’s earnings were down 95%, representing their first fall in profits in three years. Toshiba is not a one-trick pony and has good prospects in other product areas, so don’t feel too bad for them. They’re still active in the DVD forum and I’m sure we’ll be hearing about at least one or two measures aimed at keeping DVD technology afloat as the world switches to Blu-ray or other ways to get movies.

The big news in movie deals has been that you have to look over in Australia or Europe for the HD DVD fire sales. Australian sites such as EzDvd and Dvdcrave have been selling a lot of discs for prices as low as USD $8.50 and under. Some of these titles are already around $10 at Amazon, Fry’s or DeepDiscount, but it seems that the stores from down under are offering more discs from more studios at these low prices.

On the European front, the various Amazon sites have had some good deals on discs too, but the currency conversion rate from Pounds and Euros is not as favorable when compared to the Aussies. Still, there are some really interesting titles there, many of which were only available on Blu-ray here.

There’s no need to worry that European or Australian discs won’t work with your US player. Region encoding was never enforced on HD DVD discs, and there’s no such thing as PAL incompatibility on HD. Except for the fact that a European disc may have different language options, the movies themselves will work just fine.

Shipping costs don’t really weigh down the final price much, and it might take a few more days to get discs internationally, but if you’re definitely not getting into Blu-ray any time soon, then this may be a good way to get some of the movies you had always wanted. Don’t forget that Paramount has still not come out with any solid Blu-ray plans, and Universal’s first Blu-ray discs barely scratch the potential catalog they had put out on HD DVD. This means that the only way to enjoy certain titles on HD discs is still via HD DVD.

Most of the deals from the start of April are still in effect at US-based stores, and you can revisit this April 4 posting for more information about those sales.

• EzDvd clearance sale on HD DVD
• Dvdcrave has lots of HD DVD titles under USD $9

Universal Studios was the staunchest in its support of HD DVD, and there’s been plenty of speculation about when they’d finally start releasing any of their titles on Blu-ray now that the format war is officially over.

The guessing can now formally end. According to a Hollywood Reporter / Reuters story, Universal will bring its Mummy series out on Blu-ray on July 22, consisting of The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and The Scorpion King. No doubt, this is timed to coincide with the theatrical release of the fourth movie in that series, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor starring Brendan Fraser and Jet Li.

Many of Universal’s favorites on HD DVD will make their way to Blu-ray by the end of the year as they release close to 40 titles in the months ahead, including hits such as American Gangster, Knocked Up, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

No word yet on Paramount’s plans to return to the Blu-ray flock that they once broke bread with.

• Universal joining Blu-ray bandwagon in the summer at Yahoo! News
• Universal Unveils Blu-ray Disc Plans at Home Media Magazine

includes some statements from Universal Studios Home Entertainment President Craig Kornblau

Amazon.com is the latest company to offer some special consideration for its HD DVD customers. While stores like Circuit City and Wal-Mart have extended their refund policies, Best Buy opted for gift certificates because they recognized that some people might still want to keep their players and might be due to purchase some new movies on HD DVD, or perhaps they might take a peek at other items like a Blu-ray player or USB hub.

Add Amazon to that $50 gift certificate club. If you purchased an HD DVD player from Amazon.com before February 23, 2008, then check your email for the following letter that was sent out this morning:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who purchased an HD DVD player from us before February 23, 2008,* you might like to hear about a special offer available from Amazon.com.

New technologies don’t always work out as planned. We at Amazon.com value our customer relationships more than anything and would like to support customers who purchased these players by offering a credit good for $50 off any products sold by Amazon.com.** Just use promotional code ****-******-****** when checking out. The code is valid through April 9, 2009, so you have plenty of time to use your credit. Purchases from third-party merchants on our site are not eligible.

In addition, we’d like to share some of our top offers on Blu-ray discs , HDTVs , and other high-def technology and remind you that the Amazon.com Marketplace is available to sell items you might not want anymore as you upgrade to new ones. Also be sure to check out our monthly Amazon.com Early Adopters Delivers e-mail to find out about the latest technology.

* On February 23, 2008, the last manufacturer of HD DVD players announced it was ceasing production of those players.

** Offer cannot be used to pay for special-order titles, e-books or downloadable e-content, wireless service plans, gift certificates, gift-wrap, taxes, or shipping and handling charges. $50.00 promotional credit is per HD DVD player purchased prior to February 23, 2008–up to 10 units for a maximum credit of $500.00.

You are receiving this e-mail due to your purchase of a qualifying HD DVD player from Amazon.com. Canceled or returned orders of eligible HD DVD players are not eligible for this promotion.

You have a full year to redeem this $50 coupon on a purchase at Amazon, and it can be on anything they sell. As for me, I’m going to use it on a wireless mouse I’ve had my eye on…

November 2007 was a remarkable month in the history of HD DVD because Wal-Mart kicked off a big sale that many other retailers were quick to copy. In the end, it’s estimated that nearly 100,000 players were sold that month.

But business is business, and Wal-mart was swift in announcing they’d drop support for the format just a couple of months ago, and that was one of the factors that ultimately contributed to Toshiba’s decision to cease HD DVD production.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart is offering refunds for HD DVD players purchased on or after November 1. You just have to bring your receipt, no box is necessary. This is a big deal because Wal-Mart single-handedly brought a lot of non-technical people into the world of HD DVD and it seemed a little mean for them to so quickly ditch all of those customers.

Wal-mart is a little late to this party, however and only giving customers until April 30 to take advantage of this offer. Right around now, many of you who purchased HD DVD players from Best Buy are probably receiving your $50 gift cards — which don’t even require returning the units to the store. Prior to that, Circuit City graciously extended their returns policy to allow an extended period of time for customers to return HD DVD players.

• Wall Street Journal article