Toshiba Goes Roman, Blu-ray Player Due out Later this Year

Ah, the glorious days of the format war, ending in surrender but never a truce signed.  Toshiba ceded the war but said they would never make a Blu-ray play.  Well, the truce may finally be signed:

• EngadgetHD: Toshiba launching Blu-ray player by year's end
• BetaNews: The true mark of Blu-ray's success, a Toshiba player

According to the Japanese newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, Toshiba may be finally bringing a Blu-ray player to market by years end.

And now for a bit of format war history:

Some may recall after receiving a mortal at the 2008 CES Toshiba ultimately called a press conference to officially end HD-DVD.  At the time, Toshiba President and CEO Atsutoshi Nishida announced that it had no plans to bring a Blu-ray player to market.  Following this, Toshiba returned to good old DVD, claiming its new technology, XDE (eXtended Detail Enhancement) could bring DVD to HD quality.  The technology proved to be gimmicky, based primarily on smoke and mirror edge enhancement and sharpening.  Following the lack of enthusiasm for XDE and several other doctored upscaling schemes that Toshiba introduced in their televisions, Nishido hinted at a Toshiba Blu-ray player earlier this year.

That brings us to the present.

With last year’s holiday Blu-ray player price drops and Toshiba’s own penchant for dropping prices to compete with Blu-ray, a Toshiba player on the market would be welcome competition to finally push Blu-ray down to mass market pricing.  At the peak of the format war, Toshiba pushed HD-DVD players just below $100 but Blu-ray, now a year and a half later, is finally just crossing that mark with a bottom tier manufacturer’s player but with Sony still refusing to compete on price.  It would be nice to see competitive pressure between the two archrivals end such pricing arrogance.

Now if we could just get Hollywood to not ream us when buying the same old movies for the third time on a new home video format.

But as for Toshiba it seems they have finally learned, When in Rome…