Toshiba Delays Second-Gen HD DVDs
What Toshiba is calling, in a statement to the British electronics publication Pocket-lint, "a minor reliability issue with an outsourced LSI component," is being blamed by its UK division for the delay of its second-generation HD DVD players in Europe. US dealers were apparently also informed of the delay of the American versions HD-A2 and HD-XA2 until at least the second week of December, though Toshiba US has yet to issue a formal statement.
In the UK, Toshiba announced its upper-tier player, the HD-XE2, will most likely be released there in January, thus pushing back the premiere of Dolby TrueHD 5.1 sound for that model until the first of next year.
As a result, customers in the US and Europe -- though not in Japan -- will have to wait another month before seeing for themselves whether 1080p (progressive scan) resolution is actually better than, or the same as, 1080i (interlaced).
Early this year, just prior to the release of Toshiba's HD-A1 and HD-XA1, and other first-generation HD DVD players, it was revealed that these initial models would only be capable of generating interlaced images at the highest resolution, and that the first movies in HD DVD format would be encoded as 1080i. Meanwhile, Blu-ray Discs and players would support 1080p.
Since that time, supporters of the HD DVD format have argued that video components capable of rendering 1080p would be able to reconstitute a 1080i signal coming from a first-gen player, as 1080p. Early reviews of the first-gen players from both formats were mixed, with some celebrated reviewers actually commenting the HD DVD output looked better than Blu-ray's.
A recent Engadget report shows what purports to be a demonstration of Samsung equipment doing a better job of upscaling low-resolution, 480-line images to 1080p than to 1080i.
So when the HD-A2 and HD-XA2 were announced in September, features such as 1080p and the XA2's support for HDMI 1.3 -- the latest version of the digital interconnection standard for video and audio -- prompted at least some first-gen player owners, according to the AVS Forum, to sell their consoles in anticipation of the new and improved versions.
"Don't I feel stupid now hearing it will be a week or so before Christmas," one forum member there wrote. A new running tally of sales trends for player consoles and discs in both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats, using data provided by Amazon, now appears at The DVD Wars. There, the advantages of HD DVD's earlier release appear quite pronounced.