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Thursday February 21, 2008
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As most of the civilized world likely knows by now, Toshiba officially pulled the plug on its next-generation format, HD DVD, earlier in the week, conceding victory to Sony's Blu-ray. According to the company's official statement, Toshiba is ceasing the production of all HD DVD players and closing that wing of its business entirely by the end of March.
It seems logical that the company would take a similar approach to the production of HD DVD optical drives in notebooks, right? Well, according to Toshiba, kind of, sort of. We put the question to the company and received the following statement from a spokesperson:
As of now, Toshiba plans to suspend volume production of HD DVD optical drives for such applications as PCs. However, Toshiba will continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives within the overall PC business in regards to future market demand.
HD DVDs are essentially dead as standalone entertainment discs, but do they have a future life as high-capacity rewritable discs? Heck, even Sony's MiniDisc experienced a rebirth some time ago, right? I'm not holding my breath on this one, but for Toshiba's sake (and that of HD DVD owners), here's hoping for a little bit of a silver lining.
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February 21, 2008 4:58 PM
yea i was sad to hear that news... especially after recently purchasing a hd dvd player and some movies... now what am i supposed to do with them? hopefully the hd dvd movies will become way cheap and i can stock up :S
February 22, 2008 8:35 AM
thats my plan tooooo, lol... best buy has about 500 different HD-DVD's...and they released the major titles over the last couple of years, so, if they drop dirt cheap, its still worth keeping and having a big library of high def movies, even if they are a little old.
Toshiba most likely will try to push the hddvd as the next blank media, and frankly, i hope they do. dual layer discs are more expensive than hddvd's are when it comes to manufacturing... so, why the hell not? lord knows with the high def downloadable content, 8 gigs aint gunna be enough soon. it already isnt for me!
February 26, 2008 3:29 PM
I was rather sad to see HD DVD die. Logically, HD-DVD should have just replaced DVD as the format on the shelf since the disc was designed to hold both formats. So instead of 3 formats, DVD and HD-DVD should have been sold in the same box under the Combo format from Day 1 when HD-DVD was introduced. Personally, if they would have stopped selling stand-alone DVDs and sold just the Combo format this would have turned out way different and ended a long time ago.