Back in the heady days of 2006, there was a high definition disc format war – on the one side was Blu-ray, driven in the main by Sony, up against it was HD DVD, Toshiba, driven by Toshiba. It wasn’t a long war – Toshiba declared defeat in early 2008.
Cut to late 2009, and Toshiba have released details of their first Blu-ray player, the BDX2000. Only a few weeks ago, on August 10, Toshiba applied to join the Blu-ray disc association, so this is quick action by the company to get the player ready.
The BDX2000 will be BD-Live-capable, playback Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio Essential and will support AVCHD playback. It will also have an SDHC Card slot for playing JPEG, MP3, WMA and AVCHD files.
Please note, the BDX2000 will not play your old HD DVD discs.
Price and availability
The details released so far pertain only to the US, where it will go on sale in November for US$250 RRP. At the time of writing $250 US dollars equals about $300 Australian dollars, so if it was to go on sale here, factoring in the ‘tyranny of distance and small population’ taxes, you’d expect that that if and when it does make it here, it’d sell for around the $399 RRP mark.
We’ll bug Toshiba next week for some local details on this.
