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Blu-ray player or not, Toshiba remains serious about DVD upscaling. Its latest effort, the Toshiba XDE600, has gone on diet to shed the pounds in both weight and cost, but is it still the real deal? We find out in our Toshiba XDE600 review.
Toshiba may have finally relented and joined the rest of the tech world in the Blu-ray era, but it’s still persisting with its DVD upscaling efforts alongside it. The XDE600 replaces the long-running and highly popular XDE500 in Tosh’s AV ranks, complete with a newly aggressive price point to ward off ever-more-affordable BD spinners.
Taking it out of the box, our first impression of the Toshiba XDE600 was that you get what you pay for. It’s shallow and slender – much more so than its predecessor – and almost too light for its own good, making it feel flimsy in the hand. That’s not to say it’s poorly made, but a bit more weight wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Looks-wise it’s been given a makeover to look more refined than the Toshiba XDE600 , but the limited display and low-end remote control give away its budget price tag.
Read our Pioneer BDP-320 review now
Connectivity on the Toshiba XDE600 is more generous, though, with a choice of HDMI, component, composite and Scart outputs and a USB port on the front for playing digital media files, with DivX, XviD, MP3, WMA and JPEG all supported.
But the Toshiba XDE600 , like the 500 before it, is all about DVD upscaling. The secret sauce here is XDE processing, or eXtended Detail Enhancement in full, offering upscaling to 720p, 1080i or 1080p depending on what suits your TV best. XDE doesn’t just apply a single upscaling brushstroke to all DVDs – Toshiba says it targets only those parts of the picture that need it, leaving the rest alone. It demonstrated its prowess admirably with our test DVD of Blade Runner, a film loaded with gloomy light and subtle textures.
Toshiba makes things easier by giving you three upscaling modes to choose from, depending on the nature of the disc you’re watching. Contrast Mode did a great job for us, enhancing the detail in dark scenes, but for other scenarios you might find Colour Mode or Sharp Mode more appropriate.
The latter leaves colours and contrasts untouched and simply enhances detail – a safe upscaling entry point. Our only quibble here was that there was a hint of over-processing in some rendered elements like CGI or subtitles, but it’s hardly a deal-breaker.
You have to admire Toshiba for sticking to its guns with DVD upscaling. It may have been born out of stubbornness in refusing to bow to Blu-ray, but now that it has it’s actually liberated the XDE player.
The Toshiba XDE600 is one of the best upscaling DVD player around, and at such a low price it gets a full thumbs-up from us.
