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Toshiba America Consumer Products has announced a new technology to upconvert standard DVDs to high-definition quality, according to the company. The XDE (eXtended Detail Enhancement) upconfirts from 480i/p to 1080p and also offers several picture enhancement modes that allow for greater detail, more vivid colors and stronger contrast, according to the Fort Wayne, N.J.-based subsidiary of Toshiba. "Consumers have embraced the DVD format like no other technology and invested in large libraries of their favorite movies. As the market moves towards high definition, XDE lets them experience their existing DVD library and the tens of thousands of DVD titles in...

Washington, D.C. (June 1, 2008) -- Toshiba will soon launch an upconverting DVD player that purports to offer a picture that will rival Blu-ray's high-def disc. That's according to a report from the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. Toshiba was the chief backer of HD DVD, the high-def disc rival to Blu-ray. But the company pulled the plug on HD DVD at the end of March due to disappointing sales and overwhelming studio support for Blu-ray. At the time of the exit announcement. Toshiba executives hinted that it would soon release a standard-def DVD player that could compete with Blu-ray rather...

Toshiba’s SpursEngine Chip to Find Home in Company’s Notebooks Toshiba plans to equip some of its multimedia-oriented mobile computers with its multimedia processor that can accelerate various applications, including graphics, physics, video and so on. Toshiba did not disclose how much its customers should pay for the part. On the 8th of May Toshiba disclosed its growth strategies for investors for the year 2008, one of which was integration of the SpursEngine processor into advanced media center AV Qosmio notebooks. According to Toshiba, the Cell-derivative processor will upscale standard picture quality to high definition resolution. While the manufacturer did not...

Westinghouse strikes deal to build US nuclear power plants Apr 8 07:52 PM US/Eastern Westinghouse Electric, a unit of the Japanese Toshiba Corp., said Tuesday it had struck a deal with Georgia Power to build two nuclear power plants in the southern United States, the first such projects in 30 years. The two Westinghouse AP1000 power plants will be located at a site near Augusta, Georgia which already had two existing nuclear reactors.

TOKYO (AFP) - Japan's Toshiba Corp. said Thursday it is in talks with US firms on securing nuclear power plant contracts, as a report said it was set to clinch the 13.7-billion-dollar deals. "It is true that our subsidiary Westinghouse is holding negotiations with the aim to get final contracts but no decision has been made at the moment," Toshiba said in a statement. The comment followed a report by the Nikkei economic daily that the group was set to win deals worth a combined 1.4 trillion yen (13.7 billion dollars) to build four nuclear power plants in the United...

Washington, D.C. (March 5, 2008) -- Last week, I took some heat from readers for saying here that Toshiba should offer company discounts to HD DVD owners after announcing it was exiting the business. I reasoned that it would be good business for Toshiba to send a signal to its customers that it appreciated their commitment to HD DVD. Now that the format is going out of business, the HD DVD player will be nearly obsolete. So, an offer, let's say, of 20 percent off a Toshiba LCD HDTV would make people feel better about their investment in not only...

Only a day after Toshiba pulled HD DVD from the high-definition DVD business, conceding defeat in a long-running format war with Sony's Blu-ray, the company has officially finalized a previously announced $835M joint venture with its rival that will help lower PS3 production costs. The joint venture, to be named at a later date, will manufacture Cell chips and RSX graphic chips, both used in the PS3, as well as other microchips that go into Toshiba products. With this, Sony is trying to streamline its operations by getting rid of assets which it simply does not need or are not...

Company Remains Focused on Championing Consumer Access to High Definition Content TOKYO--Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products. HD DVD was developed to offer consumers access at an affordable price to high-quality, high definition content and prepare them for the digital...

NEWS: 15 February 2008 8:57 GMT - A movie news site is reporting that Toshiba is a matter of weeks away from conceding defeat of its HD DVD format in the next-gen high-def disc format war, giving in to Blu-ray's market dominance. The Hollywood Reporter states: "Toshiba is widely expected to pull the plug on its HD DVD format sometime in the coming weeks, reliable industry sources say, after a rash of retail defections that followed Warner Home Video's announcement in early January that it would support only the rival Blu-ray Disc format after May". "An announcement is coming soon",...

The format war has turned into a format death watch. Toshiba is widely expected to pull the plug on its HD DVD format sometime in the coming weeks, reliable industry sources say, after a rash of retail defections that followed Warner Home Video's announcement in early January that it would support only the rival Blu-ray Disc format after May. Officially, no decision has been made, insists Jodi Sally, vp of marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products. "Based on its technological advancements, we continue to believe HD DVD is the best format for consumers, given the value and consistent quality inherent...

Alright, details are slim, and we really have no idea if Toshiba has any plans whatsoever to sell these nuclear reactors to consumers -- in fact, we hope it doesn't -- but it does seem like the company is well on its way to commercializing the design. Toshiba's Micro Nuclear reactors are designed to power a single apartment building or city block, and measure a mere 20-feet by 6-feet. The 200 kilowatt reactor is fully automatic and fail-safe, and is completely self-sustaining. It uses special liquid lithium-6 reservoirs instead of traditional control rods, and can last up to 40 years,...

Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs. The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction. The...

Japan's Toshiba Corp. and NEC Electronics Corp. said on Tuesday they would jointly develop 32-nanometre chips to better keep up with rivals. The companies will continue talks about jointly producing the chips, and aim to reach a decision in 2008, they said. The two had also approached Fujitsu Ltd, but spokesman Etsuro Yamada declined to comment on whether or not Fujitsu would join the group, only saying that "Fujitsu was considering various options." Chip makers are racing to halve the production cost per function of a chip every year or two. Samsung Electronics Co., IBM, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd., Infineon...

REPORTS OF A LAPTOP exploding into flames have caused Toshiba to urge its customers to check their packages. Toshiba laid the blame for the flames, that on May 24th, engulfed the British laptop, on a Sony battery pack. Toshiba said it asked Sony to investigate the incident and the firm indeed found that the battery was at fault. It was identified as being on Toshiba's warning list, but had never been replaced. As you should be aware, laptop computers can explode at any second, especially if they have one of the ten million or so dodgy, Sony-built batteries glowing inside....

Toshiba is also contemplating installing Linux on its systems, Toshiba Italy computer division manager Luigi Cattaneo has revealed.

Wife is leaving on trip tomorrow. Of course, the battery is dead/dying, and the only way to run it is on AC adapter power. The only way I know right now of getting a replacement battery is via mail/telephone/web, via Toshiba or OEM mfr. Is there any place, in Philadelphia / NYC area, that I can buy such a battery at retail? I don't think Radio Shack carries, but maybe there's somewhere else. Thanks.

Televisions grabbed the spotlight at the Consumer Electronics Show on Sunday with companies showcasing everything from super-sized models for the red-hot LCD market to technology enabling TVs to play video straight from the Internet. A slew of consumer electronics makers introduced bigger flat-screen TVs, while others highlighted products to enhance viewing, such as a DVD player that could be a bridge between rival formats for next-generation video discs. Sharp Corp showed off a 108-inch high-definition LCD television to rival a 100-inch model introduced only hours earlier by LG Electronics Inc. Sharp said its was the biggest yet among liquid crystal...

HARRISBURG -- Gov. Ed Rendell signed a bill today that is aimed at persuading Westinghouse Electric Co. to stay and expand in Pennsylvania by locating its new engineering campus, with at least 1,500 additional employees, in one of three southwestern Pennsylvania sites.

SED televisions are similar to traditional tube televisions. Electrons are fired at a screen to create images. However, instead of coming out of a large electron gun, the electrons are fired from several thousand nano particles. One advantage is that SED televisions are much thinner than tube televisions. The performance and picture quality will also be far higher than LCDs or plasmas, he said. The contrast ratio is 50,000 to 1, far higher than LCD or plasma, he said. The response time is a millisecond, thus the image blur or ghosting that can occur with some LCDs doesn't occur. SED...

TOKYO — Toshiba is recalling 340,000 laptop batteries worldwide made by Sony Corp. (SNE), the latest in a series of problems for the company.... ....The problems are found in some of the battery packs for Dynabook and Satellite laptop models manufactured by Tokyo-based Toshiba from March through May this year, and they will be replaced for free, he said.