Talk about stubborn. Toshiba, the chief proponent of the HD DVD format, which lost out to Blu-ray last winter in the HD disc category, says it will continue to not produce any Blu-ray players or format support products of any kind, just as it also vowed to not produce them a few months ago.
Instead, Toshiba said at a Tokyo press briefing, it plans to pursue its strategy of basically rolling out DVD players that are "hard disc drive-equipped devices" designed to improve the image quality of standard DVD (a goal it had announced earlier), thereby creating sort of an informal format technically positioned somewhere between today's DVD and 1080p Blu-ray.
Apparently defiant to the end, according to several Asian reports, a Toshiba exec told reporters, "We have no intention of adopting Blu-ray for our DVD players and recorders." Toshiba plans to begin shipping its enhanced DVD players globally by about mid-November—just in time for the holiday sales season.
