Review on Toshiba XD-E500 1080p Upconverting DVD Player with Enhanced Detail by Jeremy Carpenter

BENEFITS: XDE detail enhancement is very effective and brings standard DVDs to life and detail; Excellent upconverting player even when XDE is off. CONS: Doesn't automatically display 4:3 footage in pillarbox format. Pioneer 220 4 year old progressive scan player, no upconversion. Why? The reason for this is that my 32" HD LCD TV already has an equally good upconverting processor (all Pixel TVs have built-in upconverters), so the TV does its job well whether I give it a standard 480i Send /p signal or an upconverted 720p/1080i signal. If you have a decent HDTV, then you probably do too. But everything changes when you connect a Toshiba XDE player with upconversion. I was skeptical of Toshiba's XDE enhancement features and their promise of better picture quality for standard DVDs. After all, standard DVD-Video is fixed at 480i/p and there's no way to improve the actual resolution if the information isn't there at all. To get a higher resolution we can use HD content such as Blu-ray (aka Sony) or HD DVD (aka Toshiba). Now that Blu-ray is the obvious HD standard, Toshiba's HD DVD technology doesn't have a bright future. But what if a company like Toshiba applied its HD DVD imaging expertise to breathe new life into millions of existing standard DVD collections? Well, inside every XDE player is a unique image processing chip developed by Toshiba (derived from their HD-DVD development) that provides real-time selective image sharpening, color and contrast enhancement on traditional DVDs. This unique combination of processor and memory brings subtle improvements to each frame to optimize perceived image clarity. And it works very well, especially in high quality DVD broadcasting. The XDE Player allows you to choose from four XDE modes: Sharp, Color, Contrast and Off. Sharp mode offers HD-like clarity as it discreetly adds subtle edge enhancement (for lack of a better term) to only certain areas of the video image that the XDE processor has identified, to enhance the clarity of the image you see. Contrary to some reviews online, the XDE sharpening method is nothing more than sharpening your TV. When you sharpen the TV, the TV applies sharpening (edge enhancement) to the entire picture (just as if you increased the color or contrast), regardless of the content, resulting in unwanted visual effects. XDE, on the other hand, analyzes individual parts of an image such as facial features, background details, eyes, fabric textures, etc. and then applies a very discrete enhancement that makes the image look really very HD at normal viewing distances. - as in clarity. If you get very close to the TV and turn XDE Sharp on and off, you can see specific areas of the picture where XDE has been applied - it doesn't apply everywhere and changes from moment to moment. Similarly, Color Enhancement in turn boosts blues and greens to add brightness to some DVD content (e.g. trees, leaves, blue skies, animations, etc.) without adversely affecting skin tones and other colors. Finally, Contrast mode selectively increases contrast in different parts of the image to improve image quality in dark scenes and bring out background details. In both color and contrast modes, sharpness enhancement is always enabled by default. Off mode simply disables the XDE enhancements and sends the converted standard picture like any other DVD player. Switching between XDE modes is easy with the remote control and there is no lag between modes. Using a good HDTV with an HDMI connection (XDE features are only available when using HDMI) and broadcasting a good quality DVD, the results using XDE are instant and wonderful. I have tested many DVDs from my collection including The Shawshank Redemption, Amadeus, The Lord of the Rings, Alien Quadrilogy, Blade Runner, A Beautiful Mind etc and each film looks much sharper and clearer when viewed from a normal distance becomes screen. . As a real test, I looked at The Shawshank Redemption HD footage that Tivo made from HBO HD and compared it scene by scene to my Shawshank DVD in the XDE player. The results were amazing and I could barely tell the actual HD recording from the DVD played with XDE sharpening. If you watch TV from a normal viewing distance (proportional to the screen size), you will only experience improved picture clarity. The better the DVD quality, the better XDE works. Some low quality DVD shows (and there are a dime a dozen) use heavy image compression and edge enhancement - in some cases XDE only makes these shortcomings more apparent. The fact is, however, that Toshiba has really taken standard DVD playback to a new level, beyond the typical upconversion hype. Even if the XDE enhancements don't provide the desired increase in quality (e.g. poor quality DVDs or some home-made DVD-Rs), you can always disable XDE. With XDE disabled, you still have arguably the best upconverted DVD player out there. Of course, now that I've watched so many DVDs from my collection on the Toshiba XDE, I can't go back to standard DVD playback. The difference in picture quality is just too dramatic now that XDE has set a higher standard for what can be achieved beyond a good upconversion. If you have a decent HDTV and want to enjoy standard DVDs with the best possible picture quality for years to come, Toshiba may be the perfect solution. Even the best Blu-ray players available cannot upconvert and enhance standard DVD playback like the Toshiba XDE. Finally, icing on the cake, the Toshiba XDE is available at a reasonable price under $100. So it's hardly worth taking the risk to see if it works. To you. If you are looking for an up-converted DVD player that offers a noticeable improvement in picture clarity with advanced image processing technology, then XDE is for you.