Just when you thought you had to upgrade to all that ‘fan-dangled hi def malarkey’, Toshiba have come out with an HDD recorder, the RD-X7, that can write hi def video to an old-fashioned DVD disk. Obviously there are capacity issues with DVD disks being slightly smaller than their big brother HD DVD disks, but the boffins at Toshiba have found a way around that too. Toshiba have used their unimaginatively entitled ‘HD Rec technology’ to squeeze all the zeroes and ones required for two hours of HD action onto the 4 GB or so offered by the DVD disk. Hurrah!

Oh yeah, what about the recorder itself, well there’s very little spec out there on the sucker apart from the usual support for 1080p/24. So whilst actual details are a bit sketchy the concept sounds good.

There’s bound to be a few gotchas around this new tech from the boys at Tosh, one of which is that we assume a HD enabled DVD disk won’t give you the full blown HD experience when played back on a common garden DVD player, you’ll actually need a DVD player that can spurt out the hi def output in the first place. So it may not be the ideal solution that it sounds like but hey its another option for the hi def consumer and options are good!

By the way heard the rumour that 8-track is the new CD ;)

Source: engadget

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The boffins at Toshiba have done it again, they’ve managed to squeeze more zeroes and ones onto a HDD through Discrete Track Recording (DTR) technology. Here’s the techie blurb and a pretty picture from Toshiba that for once made sense to me!

So what does this mean to you and me. Well for some reason DTR is best applied to small form factor HDDs, namely the 1.8 and 2.5 inch variations so it means more disk space for your iPod and laptop. Currently the 1.8 inch HDDs max out at 60 GB - Apple slap two of these platters together to make their 160 GB iPod - but with DTR the platters will reach a 120GB capacity allowing Apple to come out with a 240 GB iPod with the same physical size as the 120 GB model. Cool, eh?

1.8 inch HDDs are also used in other devices such mobile PCs, digital vid cams and car nav units, so their capacities should be increased as well. And for those of use who are keeping track of the score Toshiba now squeeze in 333 Gb per square inch on these new drives.

The downside? Well Toshiba doesn’t plan to start mass production of drives boasting the new DTR tech until 2009, so it’ll be a while before a bigger capapcity iPod appears, but at least it’s on the horizon.

Source: Toshiba

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Having drooled over the REGZA LCD TV range, the boys at Toshiba have rolled out a couple of HD DVD players for at least their European fans to drool over as well. The HD-EP30 and HD-EP35 will be available ‘en Europa’ from October and will retail some where around 349 euros and 449 euros respectively. So what’s the skinny on these puppies?

Well both models have 1080p image support whilst the HD-EP35 boasts Toshiba’s REGZA link plus Deep Colour functionality. Part of the REGZA link functionality includes the ability to control a full range of Toshiba units with one remote, a feature any better half is bound to appreciate!

Audio wise the HD-EP35 supports High Bit Rate Audio (7.1 channels) plus Dolby Digital Plus, True HD and DTS HD formats. Sounds good? Well, you’d better check them out soon as I’m sure they’ll be selling like the proverbial hot cakes as soon as the present giving season gets under way.

Source: Pocket-Lint

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Hot news from the boys at Toshiba if you’re looking to squeeze more storage into your laptop without resorting to external methods. They’ve just announced the MK3252GSX, a 320GB 2.5 inch HDD that spins around at 5,400 rpm and is a mere 9.5 mm tall. The reduction in height means that this little sucker will fit neatly into super-slim laptops that require a smaller 2.5 inch HDD than their more portly brothers. Other spec include a 12ms seek time, 3Gbps interface speed and 8 MB of buffer memory. There’s also an optional Free Fall Sensor function to park the heads up once ‘freefall’ is detected.

Of course the big step forward with the MK3252GSX is the added capacity, admittedly blowing away the competition by only a mere 20 GB, but it does spin faster and will slide gracefully into an ultra-slim laptop. Apparently the extra storage is available because

The MK3252GSX uses an improved read-write head and enhanced magnetic layer to boost areal density and achieves a storage capacity of 320GB.

Anyway Toshiba will start knocking this big boy out around November time, so if you are thinking of investing in a new laptop and need plenty of storage it could be worth the wait.

Source: Toshiba

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Looks like the boys at Toshiba have been busy creating a whole new range of eleven HDTVs for us to drool over. First up with 5 screen size variations is the REGZA Z3500 range, apart from the screen diagonal, 37 inch through to a whopping 57, other specs are the same for each unit

3 HDMI inputs
3 Ethernet jacks - browser built in
2 USB ports - add an external drive and you’ve got an instant DVR
1080p
120 Hz panel

Also launched are the RF350 and C3500 ranges. The RF350 sports 40 and 46 inch models with a 60 Hz panel and a couple of HDMI inputs, whilst in the C3500 range you have two 1080p models at 37 and 42 inches and two 720p at 26 and 32 inches.

Whilst any of these puppies would no doubt look awesome hanging off your lounge wall, how much of a dent will they make in your wallet? The super-cool Z3500s start at US$3,153 for the 37 inch and go all the way up to $5,254 for the 57 inch big boy. The other ranges whilst less sexy have a lower price range from $1,314 for the 26 inch 720p up to $3,415 for the 46 inch RF350. All units will become available in Japan throughout the remainder of the year with US versions of the Z3500 available towards the end of 2007 with lower price tags too.

Source: Electronista

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I’m all for combining your gadgets, so I was thrilled to see that Toshiba’s latest LCD TV offering the Regza H3300 has an integrated 300GB hard drive. If 300GB is not quite enough recording space for you, then there are external SATA ports to connect up your TB drives as well. The H3300 comes in two sizes, 46 and 52 inch, and both boast 1080p resolution with 120Hz refresh.

Both versions have dual HDMI inputs as well as a DVI port along with a VGA connector for the analog amongst us. These puppies will be available in Japan on the 20th of this month and are priced at $4,276 for the 46 inch and $5,099 for the 52.

There’s no news yet as to when they’ll be available in North America or the rest of the world for that matter, but I’ll certainly be checking them out when they arrive at my local Toshiba dealer.

Source: Electronista

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On Tuesday Toshiba will be unleashing the world’s first HD DVD rewritable slimline drive for laptops. The SD-L912A supports just about every other format too, DVD-RW, CD-RW etc. However the drive is only available as OEM, so we’ll have to wait until around July when it’ll be shipped out in new laptops presumably including the sexy Toshiba Qosmia range of laptops.

Although the RW speed is a meagre 1x (taking 2 hours to store 30GB of dual layer data) this is certainly a big step forward in the accessibility of HD DVD for the end user.

Source: engadget

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