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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.

IBM, in cooperation with fellow industry giants Sony and Toshiba, recently announced a new processor, called the Cell. While this in itself is not really cause for much celebration (except perhaps for the odd bedfellows involved in the project) the new multi-core chip might well prove to be something special. For one thing, it's going to be at the heart of Sony's upcoming Playstation 3 console, which we have a feeling may be slightly popular…The Cell processor is vastly different from conventional processors inside. This tiny chip contains a powerful 64-bit Dual-threaded IBM PowerPC core but also eight proprietary 'Synergistic...

Toshiba and Sony expect dramatic gains in electronics for entertainment. SAN FRANCISCO – IBM Corp. on Monday formally unveiled what it describes as a "supercomputer on a chip" that promises to dramatically increase the computing power in video-game systems, televisions and other consumer electronics.At an engineering conference here, semiconductor designers from IBM and partners Sony Group and Toshiba Corp. said their new "Cell" processor has 10 times more computing power than traditional chips in handling some applications.*********************************************** Cell is said to run at clock speeds greater than 4 gigahertz, which would top the 3.8 GHz of Intel's current top-speed chip....

LOS ANGELES--Today saw the second of the big three console makers announce its next-generation platform. At its pre-E3 press conference, Sony Computer Entertainment gave the world its first look at the PlayStation 3, as it is now officially called. While the device's price has not yet been set, its release window--spring 2006--has. Flanked by Sony Computer Entertainment America President and CEO Kaz Hirai, SCE head Ken Kutaragi introduced it as a "supercomputer for computer entertainment." The name was not unexpected, since Sony had been running an extensive teaser-ad campaign prepping the public for the PlayStation 3. The company had laid...

PlayStation 3 tackles world ills The PlayStation 3 is released in November The spare processing power of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) will be harnessed by scientists trying to understand the cause of diseases like Alzheimer's.Sony has teamed up with US biologists who already run the distributed computing project, folding@home (FAH). The project harnesses the capacity of thousands of PCs to examine how the shape of proteins, critical to most biological functions, affect disease. FAH say a network of PS3's will allow performance similar to supercomputers. With 10,000 machines joined together the researchers calculate they should be able to do...

Macinteltosh is small beer compared with the PS3 WHILE THE PRESS brouhaha happily follows Apple about and co-conspirator Intel looks on, smugly hoping its tie-up with the much-loved computer maker will bring it some added kudos in its assault on the consumer electronics market, IBM, the giant ousted from the party, is getting on with business. Big Blue may have been dumped by Apple but its compensation is plentiful. Its Power chips form the heart of upcoming console offerings from Sony and Nintendo as well as the XBox from Microsoft. And let's face it, the press might like Apple and...

Since 2000, Folding@Home (FAH) has led to a major jump in the capabilities of molecular simulation. By joining together hundreds of thousands of PCs throughout the world, calculations which were previously considered impossible have now become routine. FAH has targeted the study of of protein folding and protein folding disease, and numerous scientific advances have come from the project. Now in 2006, we are looking forward to another major advance in capabilities. This advance utilizes the new Cell processor in Sony’s PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology (as well as new...

This news came out a week ago (edit: IBM’s press release came out this afternoon) but I didn’t have anything to add so I didn’t post it. I decided this morning that it was interesting and ought to get a mention just for the news.****************************Specifically, a supercomputing machine—dubbed “Roadrunner” and set to be fully installed by 2008 at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory—will run on some 16,000 Cell Broadband Engine processors and a similar number of AMD Opteron processors. The Cell chip was originally built for Sony’s Playstation 3 console, which has been delayed until November...

Mercury Computer is sampling a PCI-Express add-in card powered by a Cell processor running Yellow Dog Linux. The Cell Accelerator Board (CAB) targets rendering, ray tracing, video/image processing, and signal processing applications, and is said to deliver 180 GFLOPS (billion floating-point operations per second). (Click for larger view of Mercury CAB) Mercury claims the CAB will be the first Cell-based system for the "workstation" market, when it ships early next year. Mercury also claims to have shipped the first Cell-based computer in general, a 470 pound blade chassis that shipped in January. The CAB runs a Yellow Dog Linux BSP...

Toshiba Reaches 200GB Milestone Stroage, storage, storage. That's what a media center laptop needs and Toshiba's new 2.5 inch hard drive gives you just that. The 200GB dual-platter MK2035GSS is Toshiba's first Perpendicular Magnetic Recording drive to incorporate tunnel magneto-resistive recording (TMR) head technology (no, we don't know what that last bit means either, but it sounds impressive). PMR technology enables bits of data to be stored in a perpendicular format rather than longitudinally and, thus enables the magnetic disc to store significantly more data in the same space.The new drive sets a density record, says Toshiba, although the outright...

In Mar 2006 I read Japanese book "ƒXƒNƒŠƒ…�[‰¹‚ª��‚¦‚½ “ŒŽÅŽ–Œ�‚Æ•Ä�î•ñ�H�ì‚Ì�^‘Š" (in English, "The truth of Toshiba COCOM affair and American information manipulation : The noize of Soviet's submarine was gone.") (1993) by Japanese journalist Mikio Haruna �t–¼Š²’j or Washington DC Cheif ƒ�ƒVƒ“ƒgƒ“Žs‹Ç’·, Kyodo News ‹¤“¯’Ê�MŽ� and, soon, I suspect Toshiba Corp killed US Commerce secretary Malcolm Baldrige as Mind-control Terrorism. Nextly, I read 2 other Japanese books, 2ndly, "ƒhƒLƒ…ƒ�ƒ“ƒg“ŒŽÅ‚Ì�ߌ€ ŽŸ‚É‘_‚í‚ê‚é‚Ì‚�‚Ç‚±‚©" (in English, "The tragedy of Toshiba Corp as a documentary : Who is next target of America ?") (Dec 10, 1987) by Japanese Eiji Oshita ‘剺‰pŽ¡ and 3rdly, "“ŒŽÅŽ–Œ�‚Ì�^‘Š" (in English,...

LONDON (AP) - Japan's Toshiba Corp. is buying nuclear plant builder Westinghouse Electric Co., the U.S.-based unit of the British government's British Nuclear Fuels PLC, for $5.4 billion US. Toshiba said it will acquire 100 per cent of Westinghouse but it expects to have several minority investors who want to become involved. "With Westinghouse, Toshiba will be a global nuclear power business organization committed to delivering world-class nuclear power generation systems and services, backed up by proven technology, reliability and superb efficiency," Atsutoshi Nishida, president and CEO of Toshiba, said in a statement. The high-profile battle for control of Westinghouse...

Winning Westinghouse Electric bidder to pay $5.4 billion Nuclear power's surge in popularity lifts price British Nuclear Fuels PLC yesterday inked a deal to sell Westinghouse Electric Co. to Toshiba Corp. for $5.4 billion -- nearly triple what BNFL initially expected Westinghouse to fetch, reflecting an anticipated worldwide resurgence in building nuclear power plants. BNFL, which announced a tentative agreement with the Tokyo-based electronics giant last month, said it expects the sale to be completed in about six months. In a news conference in London, Toshiba reiterated that Westinghouse would remain headquartered in Monroeville and "retain its current intellectual property,...

Toshiba has designed a mobile phone using the world's smallest disk drive, according to Japanese sources. The 2.1cm drive, also made by Toshiba, is so small that six would fit on a business card. Japanese mobile phone service provider KDDI said that the W41T handset will go on sale in Japan early next month. The operator is positioning the phone primarily as a music player, and the launch will tie in with the start of KDDI's new music download service due in April. The 157g W41T also features Bluetooth wireless connectivity, a 3.2-megapixel camera, a 2.4in 240 x 320...

The wraps came off high-definition DVD players at this year's annual Consumer Electronics Show, offering the final component to replicate the movie theater experience at home. And while a fierce DVD format war likely will delay the mass adoption of such devices, digital video is here to stay - the Consumer Electronics Association trade group estimates 25 million U.S. homes will have a high-def TV set by year's end. But big, expensive flat-panel sets aside, this year's gadget show offered plenty of smaller screens for video... Yahoo Inc., DirecTV, Starz Entertainment Group and Sony were also among the companies getting...

A four-core chip home server system will be able to deliver one billion floating-point operations per second, apparently. Move up to a 32-core chip - in, say, a blade server module - and you'd get 32 gigaflops of processing power, while a 64-core slab of silicon inside a rack-mount unit doing graphics work would churn out two teraflops, according to Kutaragi's presentation foils... Kutaragi likened a single Cell chip to IBM's 32-node RS/6000-based chess supercomputer Deep Blue. The exponential scaling rate suggests Cell really doesn't come into its own until you use lots of them together.

Steve Jobs might not approve, but Apple's latest operating system can be installed on any x86 hardware. How well does it function? Read our preliminary labs test to find out. Back in June, when Apple boss Steve Jobs announced the platform change to the x86 architecture, some Apple-watchers could not believe their ears. Had Jobs not preached for years that Intel's architecture was much too slow? But Apple's slogan is not 'Think Different' for nothing. Its decision to support the x86 architecture lies in the unsatisfactory performance of the incumbent PowerPC processors - particularly in the lucrative and growing notebook...

Toshiba is gearing up to release a fuel cell cartridge powered by methanol that could keep an iPod running for an additional two and a half days without a recharge. The Tokyo-based company said it is testing prototypes of what it calls a direct methanol fuel cell, or DMFC. The cartridge contains a passive supply of the alternative fuel in highly concentrated form, which produces electricity by causing a chemical reaction. Credit: Toshiba After three years of delays, Toshiba said commercial products based on the technology are expected to appear on store shelves in 2007. Fuel cells usually use alcohol...

Toshiba says it has become the first manufacturer to commercially release hard drives with perpendicular recording platters, an industrywide innovation that greatly increases the amount of data a drive can hold. The MK4007GAL 1.8-inch drive packs 40GB on a single platter, which is the most for a 1.8-inch diameter hard drive platter to date. The platters can hold 206 megabits per square millimeter. The drive can be found in Toshiba's Gigabeat F41 music player. Toshiba also makes drives for Apple Computer's iPods. Two configurations of the drive exist: a 40GB with one platter and a two-platter 80GB drive. Next year,...

TOKYO — In an expansion of their alliance, Microsoft (MSFT) and Toshiba said Monday they plan to develop high-definition DVD players together, cross-license technologies and cooperate in designing new models of mobile personal computers. The deal, announced by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates (search) and Toshiba Corp. President Atsutoshi Nishida, is a big win for the HD-DVD (search) format in its competition against another technology called Blu-ray Disc (search), which is backed by Sony Corp. (SNE) and Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL), to become the world standard for next-generation of DVD players.

Sony, Toshiba close to reaching common DVD standard TOKYO (AFP) - Sony and Toshiba may agree on a common standard for the next generation of DVD technology within a week, ending a battle for a dominant system that had raged in the industry. The "blue laser" players will use light beams with a shorter wavelength than the red light of current DVD and CD players, promising higher data storage and picture quality to match high-definition television. The two companies are close to hammering out a format that would couple Toshiba's software technology with Sony's disc structure, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun...

Gartner Inc. reported Friday that despite disappointing results for most vendors shipping computers in the United States, Apple has leapfrogged Toshiba to become the fifth largest vendor of PCs for the region, based on Gartner's estimates of shipments made during the first calendar quarter. "Apple's PC shipments in the United States increased 45.1 percent in the first quarter," reported Gartner. For the fiscal quarter ending in March, Apple reported 477,000 CPU units shipped for its Americas segment, which include North, South and Central America. The company also reported another 144,000 units shipped through its Retail segment, which includes domestic and...

Semiconductor designers from International Business Machines, Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the inner workings of a “supercomputer on a chip” they claim could revolutionise communications, multimedia and consumer electronics. The Cell microprocessor has been under development by the three companies since 2001 in a laboratory in Austin, Texas. Its unveiling at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco has been eagerly awaited and products containing Cell including Sony's PlayStation 3 games console are expected as early as next year. Advance reports suggest the chip is significantly more powerful and versatile than the next generation of micro-processors...

Cell Architecture Explained: Introduction Introduction Designed for the PlayStation 3, Sony, Toshiba and IBM's new "Cell processor" promises seemingly obscene computing capabilities for what will rapidly become a very low price. In these articles I look at what the Cell architecture is, then I go on to look at the profound implications this new chip has, not for the games market, but for the entire computer industry. Has the PC finally met it's match? To date the details disclosed by the STI group (Sony, Toshiba, IBM) have been very vague to say the least. Except that is for the patent...

TOKYO - Two Japanese companies said Tuesday they have developed a DVD that can play on both existing machines and the upcoming high-definition players, raising hopes for a smooth transition as more people dump old TV sets for better screens. Toshiba Corp. and Memory-Tech Corp. said their disc has a dual-layered surface that can store both types of data on the same side. For consumers, that would eliminate the potential headache of having to own two types of DVD players: Both will be able to read such discs, though only the newer equipment can take advantage of the higher-resolution technology....

Toshiba Announces Participation In United Nations Global Compact Initiative Tokyo, Japan, Jan 13, 2004 18:24 (JST) - (JCN Newswire) - Toshiba Corporation (TSE: 6502) today announced that its participation in the United Nations Global Compact Initiative has been acknowledged and accepted by the United Nations. The company's participation represents its support for the nine principles of the Global Compact in respect of human rights, labour rights and the protection of the environment, and a determination to integrate the values of the Global Compact into Toshiba's strategy, culture and day-to-day operations. The Global Compact and its nine principles were proposed by...

<p>Tokyo, Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Toshiba Corp. will begin commercial production as early as 2004 of a new processor capable of handling sophisticated graphics and sound over the Internet, the first product of its collaboration with International Business Machines Corp. and Sony Corp.</p>