Cita:
I would be cautious with this new Toshiba player if anyone really needs
1080p 24fps.
On a meeting tonight Toshiba did not assure me that the unit would be
firmware upgradeable after I pointed the flaw to them on their press
presentation.
They were reluctant to disclose or advance any information regarding 24fps,
they did not want to commit an official word that such feature would
actually be firmware upgrade, or if they were expecting consumers to wait
for the 3rd gen player.
That reaction is sufficient to make me look somewhere else if I would still
be looking for a player with 24fps, and not run the risk of assuming the
best.
It would have not taken more than a couple of words on the press release
stating that the misleading 1080p spec meant only 60fps, and informing of
the possibility of a near future 24fps firmware upgrade, but nothing was
said in written not verbally, and the response to my inquire was evasive,
which gave me the answer itself.
I had a long discussion with the Toshiba person in charge of the technical
presentation, and he agreed with me on the subject but he admitted that
Toshiba did not seem to listen or care for the subject, he confessed that he
ran 24fps obtained from telecined flagged HD DVDs by the VP50, which got rid
of the extra fields, he did that to show how better is 24fps than anything
else, side by side on the CES truck.
He said that it was easy by the scaler because all HD DVD film based movies
so far have consistently used the telecine flag and the VP50 scaler did not
have to do much work to remove the fields added by the player, looking for
the flag, rather than detecting the film cadence (when flag presence is
erratic). He agreed with me that such extra video processing was better to
be avoided for the signal to be cleaner if the player would output 24fps
like Blu-ray.
Such overlook, intentional or not, when they had the opportunity to
incorporate 1080p outputs correctly on a second generation, and with the
time to do it, and under the competitive pressure of Blu-ray having such
feature, is enough for me to ignore Toshiba all together until further
notice.
Now, for people not interested on 24fps, Toshiba is still a good alternative
specially at the price.
Cita:
Regarding the 24fps subject of the two Toshiba players, I confirm my
statements above after further discussions with Toshiba at CES.
The 2nd generation unit that is already out would do 1080p but not 24fps.
There is no plan to upgrade the unit. There was no statement if such
upgrade, if it ever happens, would be HS or SW only, not even unofficially,
and believe me, I wasted 1 hr at their booth (with Andy from this list,
great to see you Andy), went to 3 levels of technical support to make
absolutely sure we have no surprises or misunderstandings.
The unit that is planned for spring will have 1080p outputs, but as of now
there is no 24fps functionality on it, Toshiba declared that the complete
spec was not finalized yet, and it "might" happen that such feature be added
before the unit is out (but that was said as a shot from the hip after my
insistence of outputting the exact format recorded on the HD-DVD for film
content).
I assume that if enough pressure from consumers is made to include such
feature, in addition to the pressure of Blu-ray already having it, could
make Toshiba change their mind; it happened before with other manufacturers.
Sorry for the bad news to those looking for 24fps for the purity of
reproduction of film content, but is better to know well, than to guess,
buy, wait and be disappointed later.
We are wrapping CES in a couple of hours so I have to move on.