Amid all the hype about Microsoft and Intel getting behind the HD DVD format, Toshiba’s announcement Tuesday that it planned to start shipping HD DVD-capable PCs in early 2006 nearly got lost in the shuffle. Maybe that’s because the units will initially only be available in Japan and the company doesn’t seem to have translated the release into English?
According to Toshiba, the HD DVD-capable PC will debut in Japan in early 2006 and feature a slim, read-only HD DVD drive developed jointly by Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology, itself a joint venture between Toshiba and South Korea’s Samsung. The system will also be able to read and write conventional CD and DVD disks, but it’s not clear from Toshiba’s announcement whether that functionality will be provided by the same mechanism supporting HD DVD or a separate drive. In theory, the HD DVD technology permits backward compatibility with many existing CD and DVD formats, so it’s theoretically possible one mechanism could do it all, even if not in this first-generation effort.
At this time, no timetable for a U.S. or European rollout of a HD DVD-capable system has been announced; Toshiba says it expects several movies to be available in HD DVD format by the end of the year, with increasing availability of HD DVD content during 2006. It would make sense for Toshiba to tie product introduction outside Japan to the availability of HD DVD media in other markets.
