I’m hoping you really dig Toshiba, because they had quite a range of announcements for the public on the 28th. First, they introduced two new DVD recorders – one of which contains a 600GB hard drive for an unknown reason. Also introduced was the “Face” line of TVs. As in, “Face” the truth that you’re likely too poor to buy these.
Besides announcing some actual products, Toshiba of course had a slew of supposed next-generation device concept models to show off to the public. These include HD DVD recorders/players, SED (what) TVs, various Bluetooth solutions, and finally, a range of products containing the company’s 0.85 inch hard drive. Yes, the same one that’s in the Guiness Book of World Records.
Plenty more coverage and details after the jump.
To start, I’ll cover the “real products.” Impress Watch took all these pictures, by the way. Plenty more are available on the article linked at the end.
I mentioned a DVD recorder with a 600GB hard drive. This would be it. The “RS-X5” will cost a smashing $1500 USD, but I suppose that’s the price you need to pay for “the industry’s largest.” Another interesting feature of this new recorder is its ability to playback video over Ethernet. And I don’t mean play PC video on TV – I mean play video recorded by this device on your computer. I’m not entirely too sure what this feature would be used for if you’ve got a TV instead, but whatever floats your boat. Speaking of floating boats, this is apparently also one of the first DVD recorders to support writing VR mode to DVD-R discs. I don’t know what that means either. Google?
That would be the beautiful Noriko Fujiwara. I don’t know what the hell she’s sitting on, or standing in front of. But it doesn’t matter.
Err, it appears she’s got her hot ass perched on the “RS-XS24.” For about 1/3rd of the price of its big brother (the X5), you lose nearly 520GB of hard drive space, the “DVD-R-VR” mode support, and the ability to playback your video on your PC.
Behind her appears to be one of the new products in the “Face” series of LCD TVs. On the “LZ-150s,” you’ll find a feature I’m still contemplating the legality of. Using a standard (100BaseT) network connection, High Definition video can be recorded to the hard drive of a PC attached to the same network as the TV. What the hell? While the signal is “encrypted” on the TV’s digital tuner, I suspect hackers will have a heyday with this feature.
Just as an unrelated side note, Noriko Fujiwara has allegedly expressed interest in becoming a Bond girl. I believe she would be the first Japanese chick to fill the role, but she has run into some difficulty due to her inability to speak English well enough. Another reason cited for her difficulty is “inability to act,” but it’s not as though Halle Berry can act, so I don’t consider this a valid reason. ANYWAY.
That does it for products that you can actually go out and purchase before the end of the year. Here’s where the fun starts — Toshiba demonstrated their vision of what the company will be like in 2010. It may seem kind of dry, but a good amount of information is conveyed in this PowerPoint slide.
I shall translate the mysterious moon language for you, because I’m such a nice guy. Beginning in the upper left, we have “advancement of TV.” And we do get quite advanced – the specifications list a TV with thickness of less than 50mm, weight of under 10kg (durr 22 pounds), playback of all sorts of signals, three dimensional navigation, seamless searching of recorded contents, wireless High Definition, and even a hard drive. I’ll get into the hard drive mess later.
In the lower left, you’ll see the “advancement of DVD [recorders].” As you may remember, Toshiba is one of the primary backers of HD DVD. Thus, we see appplications including “the expansion of HD DVD,” interactive DVDs, terabyte-class hard drives, server/portable types, and again wireless High Definition. Six years down the road, I’ll be recording to terabyte class hard drives using wireless High Definition? Oh, that’s right, I’m poor, and still will be in 2010.
The “advancement of cameras” includes seamless changing between movie and still modes, ultra-small sizes, removable hard drives, NAND flash memory, and most importantly, use of fuel cells. At least there’s one company interested in them.
Finally, we get to the “advancement of hard drives.” At the 3.5″ size, Toshiba plans for drives ranging from 640GB to 2TB. 2.5″ brings us to 320 to 640GB, 1.8″ at 160 to 320GB. Finally, Toshiba is aiming for 0.85″ drives in the 15 to 30GB range in 2010.
Following the same order as I just did, Toshiba has shown off their first “SED” LCD TV. I had a hard time ignoring the stacked Japanese woman on the right to be able to read “SED” stands for “Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display.” I don’t know what that entails either, but if it has to do with stacked Japanese women, I’ll preorder two. Toshiba plans for a share of over 25% by 2010 in the “over 40 inch” market of TVs.
I already sort of addressed this by showing you the new XS-5 and XS-24, but Toshiba of course has other items in store. What better than an HD DVD recorder and HD DVD player? While the first image (of the recorder) is quite obviously a render, the image below it shows an experimental model of an HD DVD player. So at the very least we know the format is going SOMEWHERE.
Toshiba didn’t quite go into the cameras as I had planned, so I’ll pretend that PowerPoint slide says “advancement of Bluetooth.” And there was quite a bit of advancement on display – a version of their gigabeat player was controllable using a cellular phone equipped with Bluetooth capabilities. A rendering of some wireless Bluetooth headphones (containing a 0.85″ HD, too) was also shown.
Basically, Toshiba plans on slapping one of their 0.85″ hard drives in every portable device imaginable. That’s because I can only imagine video cameras, cellular phones, audio players, PDAs, projectors, mobile photo viewers, portable media players, and headphones.
So as you can see, 2010 should be quite an interesting year. My personal prediction? I won’t be able to afford any of this sort of stuff in 2010 either.
That just about wraps it up for coverage of the announcement event, but stay tuned to Gizmodo for other visions of the future.
Toshiba Revival from ‘Toshiba Visual,’ SED in 2010 [AV Watch]
