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 The first HD-DVD player should be available within the next couple of weeks, but there is a slight catch. It comes as a part of a portable Toshiba Qosmio G30 Core Duo-based PC costing around £2,000. No rush to buy is expected because at the moment there are no films released on HD-DVD to watch on it. All the same, Toshiba feels they are keeping their customers ahead of the game.
CONTENT APPEARS IN APRIL "This is more of a future-proofing option for the consumer," says Andy Bass, director and general manager of Toshiba Information Systems UK. In other words, G30 buyers will be HD DVD-ready when films are released, with the first ones appearing "in the April/May time-frame". In fact, a consumer-style HD-DVD played could well launch alongside the first HD-DVD films on disc, but that's down to a different division of the company. 
The first films might even be launched alongside a consumer-style HD DVD player, but if so, that's a different part of Toshiba and not Bass's problem. If you stick with the HD-DVD G30 laptop, you get quite a lot for your money. You can run movies via its HDMI interface on an external HDTV screen, as well as on its own better-than-HD-quality 1920 x 1200 pixel LCD screen, with Dolby home theatre sound. The picture quality is said to be impressive, being identical to Sony Blu-ray movies - these systems use the same sound and video codecs. TOUGH MARKET Toshiba may find HD-DVD a tough sell because it uses DVD-style discs and a DVD-compatible player, with the real difference lying in the almost invisible switch from a red to a blue laser. This ups the disc's storage capacity from 4.7GB to 15GB or, if it is a dual-layer disc, 30GB, without greatly increasing the cost, Toshiba claims. Blu-ray, when it arrives, may be an even tougher sell for Sony. Someone will need to explain why you need to scrap all your DVD production lines, and replace them at great expense, to introduce a new system that delivers identical sound and picture quality to HD-DVD. TOSHIBA "PASSIONATE" ABOUT HD DVD Toshiba's European head of marketing, Oscar Koenders, claims HD DVD will be first to market and cheaper than Blu-ray, but he also says Toshiba is "passionate about the HD DVD standard". That's because it has been adapted and adopted by the DVD Forum, just like the original DVD. "The DVD Forum has never reviewed the Blu-ray standard, because it wasn't allowed to," he says. "And we can't allow somebody to stand up and say 'we don't care about industry standards'."
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