Almost a year and a half after admitting defeat in the HD format wars, Toshiba has confirmed plans to produce and market its own Blu-ray disc player. The company had been trying to pitch an enhanced DVD player as a cheap alternative to Blu-ray late last year, but according to a report in Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun they finally gave up on that idea and may have a product in stores by year’s end.

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wow. aint that a kick in *** and the next fifty-four dollar question is when microsoft is go ahead in cave in and make xbox 360 blu-ray or they going to be gay about it.

Why would they bother, it's not necessary.

because its another function to persuade people to buy there product and if i get an elite, i would like to have blu-ray! They should put blu-ray on the elite but not the others, this would make sense since the difference between the elite and premium isn't much at all.

Since Toshiba and Samsung are in "cahoots", with the "TSST" corporation, (Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology), it could be almost argued that they already do market Blu-Ray through Samsung. Obviously, this is likely an oversimplification of their corporate entanglements, but still.....

wtg Toshiba? maybe? I dunno

A whole six million? Man, there might be that many still using dial-up.

Microsoft charges game studio's a license fee per disk. I've read (from a John Carmack interview, IIRC) that it's taking these studio's some time and money to shrink the graphics, audio, and video down to fit into the constraints of the Xbox 360 DVD just to same the license fee's of the second disk. Blu-ray would essentially afford them more storage at possibly a reduced license fee - when comparing a multi-disk DVD license.

In my opinion, an Xbox 360 with a Blu-ray drive will not be a built-in option. It *could* be released as an add-on external product. But Microsoft would never redesign the Xbox 360 mid-production and make 30+ millions previous Xbox 360's obsolete.

Yep, doesn't make sense for MS to move to Blu-Ray at this point. The Xbox360 might have 2-3yrs of life left, if that, before they release a replacement. It'd be costly to move to Blu-Ray and if they did that, they'd have to be compatible w/ the other games already released. Even more costly.

They're already affordable for most developers, compared to Sony, so I'm thinking the ease of development & savings there, outweigh the costs of any shrinking graphics/audio/video due to constraints of the system.

Wait a minute... this isn't about MS or Xbox360! ;P With that said, I'm glad Toshiba is finally jumping in. More competition means more affordability.

Happy to see Toshiba involved in Blu Ray... Their optical drives are always in our top three for quality and reliability, though their prices are a tad high.

Who's "our?"

It really grinds my gears that my Toshiba has a HD DVD player in it!

Blame the ****** who went the way of the lemming. I was rooting for HD-DVD - would have made movies & software more affordable, I do believe.