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Having now had time to recover from the crippling defeat of its HD-DVD format at the hands of Sony’s hi-def Blu-Ray disc standard, Toshiba is planning a fresh charge into the HD market – this time placing upscaling at the centre of the battle, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Details on the technology, which has been produced in association with Sharp, are still sketchy at the moment, but Toshiba has says it intends to release what it calls a ‘super DVD upscaling player’ that will play regular DVDs at definitions close to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
The player will, like Blu-Ray, be backwardly compatible with normal DVDs. At present, the market for upscaling DVD players far outweighs the Blu-Ray market.
For those unfamiliar with the technology, upscaling involves taking a standard definition image (typically 480 or 576 pixels wide), reprocessing it and outputting an HD image (either 720 or 1080 pixels wide).
Whilst no technology is able to conjure up more pixels than physically exist in the source image, a good upscaler outputting at an HD resolution can significantly improve image quality on a high definition TV or monitor.
