HD News: Having lost out to Blu-ray in the High Definition format war, Toshiba is fighting a rearguard action with some interesting upscaling technologies.

Resolution+, increases the sharpness of Standard Definition signals to what Toshiba claim is near HD quality.

Resolution+ sits alongside Toshiba’s other innovative upscaling technology, XDE, which has been designed to work with DVD’s. Resolution+ focuses solely on improving the sharpness of Standard Definition signals coming into the TV.

Early indications suggest that the ZV series does an excellent job with poorer quality sources such as Freeview, reducing the levels of ‘noise’ to minimal levels. However, Resolution+ looks more like an ‘Edge Enhancement’ technology which simply sharpens up the images rather than performing some form of modern day alchemy and turning SD pictures into HD.

lcd tv Resolution+ Toshiba XDE ZV series

PCRetail: Toshiba is driving demand of the standard DVD with the launch of a new advanced player, after abandoning its efforts to beat Blu-ray with the now defunct HD-DVD format. 

The XD-E500 is an upconverting player which apparently improves the visuals of a standard DVD disk, while costing much less than a Blu-ray system. XDE stands for eXtended Detail Enhancement and promises to make DVD’s look similar to Blu-rays.

At a product demonstration, Toshiba was insistent the device was not a Blu-ray rival. “If you want Blu-ray, go get Blu-ray”.

Blu ray DVD eXtended Detail Enhancement Toshiba XD E500 XDE