Toshiba sent out a press release earlier today, announcing its second generation HD DVD players, the HD-A2 and HD-XA2. While it does not look like the HD-A2 offers much more than their first generation players, the HD-XA2 ups the ante with support for HDMI 1.3 and 1080p output capability.
The new high end Toshiba HD-XA2 HD DVD player is designed to output 1920 x 1080p, the highest HD signal currently available, via High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) 1.3. HDMI version 1.3 is the most current, major enhancement of the HDMI specification, which adds support for Deep Color technology. The HD-XA2 also incorporates a 297MHz / 12 bit Video DAC with high-quality, 4x oversampling for increased bandwidth for true playback of an HD picture to a video source. The HD-XA2 comes with a picture setting function allowing customers to optimize picture quality with user adjustable settings for color, contrast, brightness, edge enhancement and block noise, among others. The new HD-XA2 HD DVD player's 1080p output capability complements Toshiba's new Cinema Series Pro LCD TVs which provide true HD 1080p input capability via HDMI.
The HD-XA2 will be one of the first next generation players to support the video portion of HDMI version 1.3. HDMI 1.3 supports the demands of future high definition display devices, such as Deep Color enabling 36-bit (RGB or YCbCr) color depths, up from the 24-bit depths in previous versions of the HDMI specification. This allows Deep Color compatible display devices to deliver outstanding video quality.
The HD-A2 will ship in October for $499.99. The HD-XA2 will follow up in December for a whopping $999.99. More information on both players is available on Toshiba's website.
