Toshiba hoping to breathe new life into DVD with better upscaling

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Blu-ray's real fight wasn't with HD DVD, which it crushed handily, but with standard DVD, which enjoys a 95% market share in the optical video disc market vs. Blu-ray's puny 5%.

Now Blu-ray may have another battle on its hands. Bruised from its HD DVD beatdown, Toshiba is reportedly striking back with a new method for upscaling DVDs, ostensibly with the goal of making DVD video quality competitive with Blu-ray. According to rampant rumors (which began on this Japanese site), Toshiba is hoping to get 1080p quality from off-the-shelf, standard-def DVDs. Toshiba has said it is not planning to offer Blu-ray technology, at least for now, and the new equipment won't play Blu-ray discs.

Anyone who's bought an upscaling DVD player in recent months (and you'd be crazy not to; the difference in quality is amazing) knows what wonders can be done with the comparatively low-resolution video on a DVD, to the point where many casual observers say they can't tell the difference between an upscaled DVD and a high-def moving image. (Toshiba has already shown off a Cell processor-equipped Qosmio laptop capable of upscaling any content to 1080p, though it's not on sale yet.)

Of course, there are limits to how much you can upscale a video. Though fancy algorithms can guess at what ought to fill in the many, many pixels lost in the downgrade from film to DVD and during the compression process, it's ultimately just that: A guess. How good a guess it will be we'll have to see when and if Toshiba's new players hit the market. They're expected by the end of the year.