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Toshiba's $800 HD-XA1 HD DVD player will be available in March.

While the Blu-ray high-definition DVD camp dithered, Toshiba boldly announced a pair of HD DVD players with firm prices and release dates. The $800 HD-XA1 supports just about every disc format known to man (Blu-ray excepted) as well as a large number of audio enhancements, including Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD. Even more amazing is the HD-A1 for just $500 with many of the same features. (With the sole Blu-ray player actually announced as a product, Pioneer's Elite BDP-HD1 due in May, clocking in at nearly two grand, those prices are looking pretty good.) HD DVD's status as a real, soon-to-hit-stores technology was further solidified by the HD DVD Promotion Group's announcement that the Toshiba players will be available as early as March through outlets including Amazon.com, Sears, Crutchfield, Tweeter, and Best Buy. Amazon actually has the HD-A1 listed for pre-order on its Web site right now.

The Group also stated that as many as 200 movie titles are expected to appear in the new format this year, with nearly 50 to coincide with the March hardware launch. Studios supporting the format include Warner, Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, HBO Video, New Line, and Studio Canal. Titles expected this spring include Batman Begins, Million Dollar Baby, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Matrix, Terminator 3, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Jarhead, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and others. Gamers will also be glad to know that an external HD DVD drive for Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is scheduled appear sometime in 2006 as well. A price for the drive hasn't yet been announced.

Building up to the introduction of 25 new flat-panel TVs, Toshiba's vice president of marketing Scott Ramirez claimed that micro-display technology (such as DLP and LCoS) has peaked and noted that LCD is steadily encroaching on plasma in the 40-inch-plus screen sizes. The company's new LCD sets offer crisp 8-millisecond response times and incorporate an advanced version of its PixelPure digital video processing, which is now a 14-bit process, up from its 8-bit origins, yielding 4,096 grayscale steps.

Toshiba once again touted its surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) technology, which it says will deliver the best blacks and fastest response time of any flat-panel display method. An SED panel comprises thousands of individual pixels, each of which operates somewhat like a tiny cathode-ray tube (CRT). While Toshiba did announce 36- and 55-inch screen sizes, that's about all it revealed; prices and delivery dates are still MIA.

In the realm of the tiny, Toshiba showed perhaps the smallest OLED screens yet, with 1.1-inch screens on its gigabeat flash-memory audio players. The MEP05FR provides 512 megabytes (MB) of storage for $119, the MEP10FK 1 gigabyte (GB) for $149. When not showing information about your music, the screens offer a choice of abstract clocks that would make Salvador Dali proud.

Finally, if you just can't record enough of your child's antics, the new GSC-R60 camcorder with a 1.8-inch, 60-GB, internal hard disk drive records up to 55 hours of modest-quality video or 13 hours in high-quality mode. It will be available in February for $999.

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