CEDIAcrunch hands-on: Toshiba XDE upconverting DVD player

Matt Burns

Matt is a Senior Editor at TechCrunch. Matt Burns is a family man first and attempts to be a writer second. Born and raised in the heart of the automotive world, only cars eclipse his love of gadgets. He previously wrote for Engadget and EngadgetHD before moving into the party house that is TechCrunch. He learned the retail side of... → Learn More

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Once upon a time, there was a high definition format called HD DVD. Now, HD DVD was developed by a company called Toshiba, and that company put its heart and soul into this format. Evenutally though, the format died off by the big blu-ray monster. Toshiba was very sad and didn’t want anything to do with the winning format. So do you know what they did? They developed the XDE-E500 upconverting DVD and I spent some time with it today.

The Toshiba XDE isn’t high-def. It isn’t even close and anyone that says it looks like HD is a moron. CEDIA ’08 is full of true 1080p pictures, being shown on the latest display technology, so the scaled 480p image looked a little out of place. It’s just another upconverting DVD player boys and girls. The ‘improved’ picture looked over-compressed and blotchy, hardly the best picture of the show.

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