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Akihabaranews: A couple FullHD televisions (1920×1080 – 1080p) have recently been announced by Toshiba !

The 46H3300 (46 inches) and the 52H3300 (52 inches) will only be produced at 1.000 units a month and are clearly aimed at the cinema lovers: 24p, 5-5 Film Mode, Twice Velocity 120fps for an unrivaled smoothness of the image and HD Clear Motion technology…

As those televisions are part of the H range (H3300 to be precise), expect a built-in 300GB HDD (eSATA) allowing you to record your favourite shows.

The price is set between 3120 and 3780€.

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Reuters: Toshiba expects its LCD TV business in China to grow by over 25% next year amid strong consumer demand ahead of events such as the Beijing Olympics in 2008, senior executives said on Sunday.

The electronics giant also aims to launch its high definition DVD player in China in the next year, trying to gain an edge as demand grows amid falling prices of high-definition televisions and DVD players.

“The LCD TV market in China is growing rapidly, it’s now maybe about double what it was last year,” Yasuhide Ozo, general manager of Toshiba’s television sales planning unit, told Reuters.

He was speaking in an interview on the sidelines of SINOCES, one of China’s largest consumer electronics shows in the eastern port city of Qingdao.

“Last year the market was about four to five million units. This year we expect 8 million units, and next year maybe 10 million units,” Ozo said, referring to China’s LCD TV market size and adding that he hopes to outperform that growth.

He added that Toshiba, which has launched under the “Regza” brand in China, has an 8 – 10% share of China’s LCD TV market.

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Ars Technica: In an effort to swing the tide in the high-definition format wars, Toshiba has announced the release of the first set of titles that support Internet connectivity features on second-generation HD DVD players. Although HD DVD and Blu-ray both launched last year, neither format is currently sporting all of their planned features. While we’re still waiting for managed copy to appear later this year, Toshiba is talking up some of the interactive features which will be featured in releases that are already out, or just around the corner.

The first title is the Japanese animated film Freedom, released last week. Freedom sports the relatively modest features of downloading an additional movie trailer, changing menu styles, and downloading different subtitles. A networked HD DVD player will grab all of this content from an online content server.

The HD DVD version of the hit film 300, due out at the end of July, will offer more substantial bonuses such as a strategy game and the ability to re-edit the movie in a different sequence and upload the results to a server hosted by Warner Bros. Blood Diamond, coming out on July 3 in HD DVD format, will offer an online poll as part of the special features.

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I4UNews: Toshiba announced today the addition of their largest ever REGZA HD LCD TV and adds that they have increased their market share by 90% in 32-42” LCD HD TVs. Toshiba announced today the availability of their 46”, 47” and 52” REGZA LCD TVs and the upcoming July availability of their largest LCD TV, the 57” Cinema Series.

The REGZA line includes a variety of series from standard to 1080p full HD. All the sets in the line use Toshiba’s PixelPure3G 14-bit internal digital video processing and DynaLight dynamic backlight. The 1080p series also utilizes the ColorBurst wide color gamut CCFL, and the CE-Link HDMI CEC control. Cinema series sets us the ClearFrame 120Hz anti-blur system and Deep Color.

The 120Hz is an important addition, normal HDTV’s run at 60Hz, Toshiba has doubles that frame rate.

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Laptop Logic: Toshiba has announced that the Satellite P205, Satellite X205 and Qosmio F45 will be the company’s first mainstream mobile solutions to incorporate HD DVD drives. Moreover, the Qosmio G45 model will the first to get a HD DVD-RW drive.

The Satellite P205, Satellite X205 and Qosmio G45 will be equipped with high-resolution 17-inch diagonal widescreen displays, while the Qosmio F45 will tbe based on 15.4-inch diagonal widescreen display.

Toshiba Satellite X205, Qosmio F45 and Qosmio G45 notebook computers are equipped with an HDMI port and can be connected to any high definition display or television at home, on the road or in a dorm room to deliver pure HD DVD content without fear of image degradation. The Qosmio G45 is capable of output resolutions up to 1080p, while the Satellite X205 will offer an output of up to 1080i output.

In addition to the HD DVD playback, which has resolution six times sharper than the DVD format, the Qosmio G45 notebook computer provides users with a state-of-the-art HD DVD-R optical drive that can burn up to 30 GB of data, including video or entire photo and music libraries, onto a single HD DVD recordable disc.

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Monsters and Critics: Despite this week’s shock announcement that Japanese electronics giant Toshiba Corporation has dramatically cut back its 2007 expectations for HD DVD player and recorder sales in the United States – a 44 percent drop from 1.8 million units to 1.0 million units – the Tokyo-based manufacturer has today unveiled brand new HD DVD hardware offerings for the Japanese market.

More pointedly, although current chatter seems to suggest that the Toshiba-backed high-definition HD DVD technology is on the wane alongside that of its central rival, the Sony-backed Blu-ray HD platform, that hasn’t stopped Toshiba from pushing out two brand new digital video recorders (DVRs) that marry together high-definition HDD recording functionality with that of the next-generation HD DVD format.

The new Toshiba VARDIA RD-A600 and RD-A300 offer themselves up as high-end DVR options sporting two truly enormous hard-disk drive storage solutions of 600GB and 300GB respectively. As offshoots of Toshiba’s existing VARDIA RD-A1 device, the two new player/recorders come with additional functions, around half the physical sizing, and, perhaps more importantly, markedly cheaper pricing.

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CRN: Toshiba has nearly halved its sales target for HD DVD players and recorders in North America following slower than expected sales in the region.

The consumer electronics giant now anticipates selling just one million units in the US by the end of the year, down from original predictions of 1.8 million.

“Obviously we are going to have to lower our previous global estimate,” said Yoshihide Fujii, head of Toshiba’s digital consumer business.

Fujii added he could not give new worldwide sales estimates, owing to uncertainty in the European and Japanese markets.

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The Inquirer: Toshiba and Hitachi have been showing off drives that push the next-gen, DRM-infused media formats into quite interesting territory. No, they don’t remove the infection, but they do make devices that any hardware geek would be very interested in.

From Toshiba we have the a slimline laptop HD DVD writer. Not much to say about this other than writing 15Gb+ disks is not something you can do on the road. Backups are now within the realm of possibility once again, as is cloning movies based on the undefeatable AACS.

The other drive has some serious potential for media centers, it is a combo HD and BD drive that will also write dual layer (50GB) BD disks. It will do BD-R and BD-RW as well as all the DVD and CD formats, plus, minus and RAM.

The only thing this drive will not do is HD-R and HD-RW.

The Hitachi drive has a SATA interface and will read next gen media at 6x and write them at 4x.

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PCRetail: Toshiba has struck back at suggestions that Sony’s Blu-Ray format is winning the HD content war by claiming that 60 per cent of all HD set top players sold are HD DVD, according to The Inquirer.

However, looking at Toshiba’s numbers, it seems that its stats do not take into account global sales of Sony’s Blu-Ray equipped PlayStation 3 console.

Toshiba says that over 150,000 dedicated HD DVD players have been sold to date, with a movie attach rate of over four-to-one compared to Blu-Ray.

“Toshiba’s latest promotional efforts are clearly resonating with consumers,” the firm stated.

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FOXNews: Toshiba aims to put disk drives for high-definition DVDs on all its laptops next year as it strives to gain an edge in the high-stakes next-generation DVD format battle, a Toshiba executive said on Tuesday.

Sony equips its PlayStation 3 (PS3) game consoles with Blu-ray Disc drives to win people to the rival high-definition DVD format, and Toshiba should use a similar tactic, said Toshiba Senior Vice President Hisatsugu Nonaka.

“The demand is there: people want to watch their favorite movies in high-definition on the road,” he told reporters at a news conference.

Toshiba, which research firm IDC said shipped 9.2 million notebook PCs in calendar 2006, is seeking to land a knock-out blow against the Sony-led Blu-ray camp, but adding high-definition drives to PCs would mean higher prices and could hurt sales.

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The Inquirer: Toshiba said it is showing off an HD DVD-RW drive for notebooks at Computex. The company will start sampling the SD-L912A in July and will support high speed read and write for standard DVD and CD disks too.

The new drive can read, write and rewrite to HD DVD-RW discs, as well as read and write to HD DVD-R discs and standard DVD and CD discs.

Toshiba’s SD-L912A enables mobile PCs to replace larger desktop systems in the home with this additional high-definition functionality.

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CrunchGear: Toshiba’s original Gigabeat is among the most successful non-iPod portable media players (PMP) out there, boosted by the fact that Microsoft used it as the basis for the Zune.

Whether or not this new Gigabeat, the Gigabeat V, will be the basis of Zune 2 is yet unknown, but Toshiba’s player does its best to stand out from the crowd. The big draw here is its 4-inch 480 x 272-pixel resolution screen.

And on that screen you’ll be greeted with a Windows Media Center-like interface, which is good or bad depending on your point of view.

The Gigabeat V is as close to a Microsoft-only PMP as you can get, with video playback limited to Windows Media Video files and no support for AAC or FLAC or any other codec other than MP3 and WMA, including WMA 9 Lossless.

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