Jeff Bezos warned Amazon shareholders yesterday that the Kindle e-book reader was not a "big cash flow generator for us".

In the meeting here in Seattle, the Amazon CEO instead characterised his digital books business as being in "investment mode".

The Seattle Times reports Bezos as saying, "If something is successful, it seems to take five to seven years or more before it's a positive contributor" to the company's profits. The Kindle, which launched in November 2007, is less than two years old.

Kindle costs over $200 to make?

Bezos also commented on a recent statement by market intelligence company iSuppli, which estimated that the Kindle 2 e-book reader cost around $185 (£114) to make. He said the retailer's manufacturing costs are actually "significantly higher".

The Wall Street Journal also speculates that Amazon is losing money on some book sales, with retailers typically paying about half the eventual retail price of $25-30 for a new release book. Amazon sells most Kindle bestsellers for $9.99 9 (£6.16).

Jeff Bezos told shareholders that where Amazon carries both the physical book and the e-book version, Kindle sales account for over a quarter of total sales of a title.

Recycling digital discs

Yesterday, Amazon also launched a trade-in service for DVD, Blu-ray and even HD-DVD discs. Customers in the US can simply pack up and post in second-hand discs (worth at least $10) to have the trade-in value applied to their account.

While premium discs like the Batman Anthology on Blu-ray can fetch prices of $35 (£22) or more, less reknowned discs like the 50 First Diates Blu-ray reflect their popularity, earning punters as little as $2 (£1.25).

Amazon is prepared to accept just 10 HD-DVD titles, with even the well respected Planet Earth box set worth just $9.25 (under £6).

In a sign of cheaper hardware to come, Panasonic has announced that its first Blu-ray hardware without a built-in recorder will also be its lowest-price deck yet.

The DMP-BD60 goes on sale in Japan on 25 April for around ¥50,000 (£340). Although the current weak pound means that might not appear particularly cheap in translation, it is around 40 per cent cheaper in local terms than the next lowest Panasonic model.

Prices dropping

In other words, buyers in Europe and the US can expect to see something that beats existing BD machines by a similar margin some time before the autumn.

The BD60 is already being touted in Japan as a second Blu-ray player for the kitchen or bedroom, suggesting that the major players aren't going to give up on the medium just yet.

US movie rental company Netflix has announced it is to no longer stock HD DVD.

This piece of news would have been the final nail for the coffin for HD DVD, if its proverbial sarcophagus were not already six feet deep – where it has been since February of this year.

As of mid-December, users of HD DVD will have to look elsewhere to find the 800-odd titles that are available for the defunct format, as this is the cut-off date Netflix has given its consumers.

DVD alternative

If you do try and rent an HD DVD release after 15 December, the company will automatically give you the film's DVD alternative instead.

If Netflix's lack of HD DVD is worrying you, then just check myriad electronic retailers' websites, where you can get most of the hi-def discs for under a fiver.

Planning to buy a Blu-ray player? Hold on. It's already battling public indifference, technical problems, laughable features and downloadable movies. Is it any wonder Blu-ray is doomed to fail? Here are five reasons why it's heading for the grave...

Toshiba appeared re-energised at its IFA press conference today with ambitious plans for the future that will finally put the failure of HD DVD behind it.

Alan Thompson, executive vice president of Toshiba Europe, acknowledged the success of Blu-ray. But he also suggested that technology was already moving beyond optical disc formats.

High resolution internet downloads, high capacity hard drives and flash memory cards being key – the ability to store up to six HD movies on 32GB flash memory cards being just one example.

Beyond 1080p

Toshiba also looks set to move beyond 1080p high definition video, with Thompson saying the company was ready to offer 4,000 x 2,000 pixel (4K) and 8,000 x 4,000 pixel (8K) displays when there was sufficient demand for them.

Wireless HDMI is also set to appear in Toshiba TVs and DVD players from next year.

The only real disappointment in the keynote came with actual products available here and now. Toshiba execs reverted back to talking about upscaling standard definition video – the only strategy left to them thanks to Blu-ray's HD format win.

Better standard def

Toshiba introduced two standard definition enhancement technologies during the keynote – Resolution+ in flat panel TVs and XDE in DVD players – both promise to improve standard def pictures with intelligent colour, contrast and sharpness controls.

Toshiba explained it was making the technologies to satisfy the millions of people who still own standard definition movies on DVD, but who want better pictures with their flat panels.

These piggy-steps will disappoint high def fans clamouring for the next big thing, but with only two per cent of Europeans currently enjoying any kind of HD content at all, Toshiba's short-term SD strategy could be a good one.

You can find out more about the new products Toshiba has launched at IFA 2008 right here on TechRadar and via the links to the right of this news.

We all know that its loss to Blu-ray in the HD format war has left Toshiba pootling around with old-school DVD technology, but a surprise disclosure reveals that it may yet have something special up its sleeve.

At the most recent meeting of the DVD Forum steering committee, in L.A. last month, the Toshiba-led group approved a logo for a new flavour of DVD to be known as 'DVD Download DL'.

Internet connected

It doesn't take a genius to work out that this suggests someone is looking to add online features to DVDs in much the same way as on BD Live disks.

Clearly, any such changes will require new players, something Toshiba has already said it is planning to provide.

When we asked Toshiba Japan to clarify this latest development, they told us, "We have not announced anything about the DVD product and we cannot talk about products based on … assumptions."

If the already-promised DVD upscaling to HD quality combines effectively with the new online feature and a price considerably lower than BD players, there may still be life in the old dog.

With news this week that vinyl is the technology that most Brits would like to preserve, we look back at the hi-tech formats we'd like to revive... and another two we wouldn't

1. HD DVD

The first format war of the 21st century has already claimed its first victim - and we’re still mourning its loss. HD DVD was - is - still a vastly superior format to Blu-ray in many respects. From the get-go HD DVD offered the kind of interactive features that Blu-ray is lamely, and belatedly, just getting to now.

Every player ever made had built-in persistent memory and an Ethernet port that not only enabled you to get access to that content, but also made the technology future-proof through firmware upgrades... well at least until Warners’ desertion in January 2008 finally persuaded Toshiba to pull the plug.

Toshiba also did its best to encourage independent movie makers - not the big Hollywood giants - to jump on board, promising a variety of and diversity of content that Blu-ray just couldn’t match.

Early HD DVD discs were also famously superior when it came to picture and sound quality too, with many Blu-ray buyers complaining about poor video and audio encoding, not to mention prematurely corrupted discs.

But the biggest reason to lament HD DVD’s demise is the cost. Right from the start, the simpler, already-established technologies used in HD DVD made the players and discs cheaper to produce and to buy, especially when compared to the Blu-ray opposition.

Given that Blu-ray player prices have actually gone up since HD DVD’s demise, it’s a loss we’ve all ended up paying for.

And remember: just weeks before HD DVD went tits-up, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer admitted that he'd wished Sony had patched up its differences with the HD DVD camp - a tacit admission that Blu-ray isn't all it's cracked up to be.

2. Laserdisc

Before Blu-ray, before HD DVD, before even DVD, there was laserdisc, a movie format that first appeared in 1978 and was a cross between CD and vinyl. Laserdisc looked like a CD, it was just 12-inches in size instead of 5-inches, and you could fit most movies on to a double-sided disc.

Laserdisc’s benefits were manifold. For a start it was the only way cinephiles could enjoy decent sound and picture quality at home. The PAL version has 440 lines of resolution, compared to 240 lines for VHS.

Laserdisc was also the only format that could offer Dolby AC-3 surround sound, the precursor to the Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD codecs we have today.

Then there’s also laserdisc’s tactile appeal. Like vinyl albums before them, laserdisc movies asked to be cherished, to be held cosseted and caressed; you poring over the sleevenotes while you waited for your laserdisc player to spin into action.

Laserdiscs undoing, of course, was that no-one bloody wanted it. With perfection flaunting them in the face, most punters turned the other cheek and settled for crumbly old VHS instead. It didn’t help of course that laserdiscs were more expensive than VHS, or that Kuro plasma TV maker Pioneer was laserdisc’s only steadfast hardware supporter.

Then came DVD, of course, and it was all over. But imagine if you could team a laserdisc-sized disc with technology advances that we have now.

You could literally cram hundreds of gigabytes on to the thing, making it perfect for use with next-gen Ultra HD technology.

3. MiniDisc

Before iPods, MP3 players and all that nonsense, Sony touted MiniDisc as a true alternative to Philips decrepit Compact Cassette. 

Arriving in 1992, it comprised a titchy magneto-optical disc that could hold up to 74-80 minutes worth of music (around the same as a CD), which was then incased in a robust 3.5cm caddy. That made it perfect for portable use, where the alternative was cassette or portable CD players the size of lady’s handbag.

MiniDisc was also ideal for in-car use - you could chuck them around the inside of your motor with few ill effects, making them a good deal more practical than scratch-prone CDs.

MiniDisc had many other benefits too. You could write to it long before CDs became recordable, and you could also record to in a non-linear fashion. So if you suddenly decided you didn’t like track 7 of a mix compilation, you could delete that one track and simply replace it with something else. Trying doing that with even a CD-R - you can’t.

MiniDisc also enabled you to title individual tracks and albums in the days before the Gracenote CD database - info that popped up in a player's display every time you played an individual track or whole disc.

The format’s critics loved to point out, of course, that MiniDisc used a lossy compression codec called Atrac. That meant it offered inferior sound quality to CD, but was obviously better than tape.

The use of Atrac also threw up the spectre of DRM in the form of the Serial Copy Management System (SCMS). This enabled you to record from a CD to a MiniDisc, but you then couldn’t make a copy of that MiniDisc using digital audio connections. Atrac and DRM, of course, lingered in in Sony’s first digital audio Walkmans - you can read them that in 8 Reasons Why You Should Never Buy v1.0.

MiniDisc’s convenient editing features and ‘good enough’ sound quality made it a surprise hit with radio stations and audiophiles alike. Sadly though it wasn’t too last. By 2000 three things were conspiring to consign MiniDisc to the history bin, They were:

1. Prices - MiniDisc players were always pretty expensive, especially for third-party licencees. This meant that rival adoptees like Sharp and Kenwood simply couldn’t compete with Sony on price, and were eventually forced out, leaving Sony as the sole hardware supporter.
2. Competition from CD-R - Although MiniDisc proved to be popular in Japan and Europe, it was eventually undone by Philips decision to flood the US market with the new CD-R recorders at below-cost prices. MiniDisc never stood a chance.
3. MP3 and the iPod - MiniDiscs days were arguably numbered in 1998 when the first MPman and Rio Diamond MP3 players arrived in the UK. By the time the first iPod arrived in 2001, MiniDisc simply looked anachronistic. Why would you want to carry around a bagful of titchy discs and a player, when you could keep all your music in the player? MiniDisc is now effectively dead.

4. Compact Cassette

By any ordinary measure, the Philips Compact Cassette simply wouldn’t make it in to this list - the technology is arguably too terrible to justify its inclusion (we’ll expand on this a minute).

The real reason we’re gutted to see it go is the almost total death of the mixtape - that painstaking paean lovers and friends used to share as way of making themselves look good to each other. We’re sorry, but making a CD compilation or sticking up an 'iMix' up on the iTunes Store is not the same...

Making hard choices about the tracks you’d choose from your vinyl collection and which order you’d place them in was exactly what made the cassette mixtape such a labour of love.

As for the technology - first developed in the early 1960s by Philips, the compact cassette really had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, first as a replacement for open reel-to-reel tape recorders, and then as the primary means for making mix tapes.

From the start, the compact cassette was really intended for audio dictation use, and was plagued by a limited frequency range, tape hiss on recordings and iffy playback due to wow and flutter.

Nakamichi famously overcame cassette’s shortcomings in the early 1970s, but only by going outside cassette’s accepted audio standards. The arrival of chrome (CrO2) and Metal tapes in the mid-1970s also pushed the limit of what the cassette could do.

Of course without the cassette tape we also wouldn’t have the 1979 invention by Sony of the Walkman portable audio player - the precursor to the iPod and other MP3 players we have today.

Today though the cassette is all but history - most hi-fi and car radio makers have some kind of cassette player in their line-up for legacy users, but in a world where CD and MP3 dominate it’s hard to see it staging any kind of comeback, mixtapes or not.

5. D-VHS

What do you mean you’ve never heard of it? That’s your problem right there. D-VHS you’ll be unsurprised to learn was launched by VHS creator JVC in 1998 as a high capacity source for the new wave of flat panel TVs. 

Partly based on technology already used in S-VHS VCRs and cassettes, D-VHS used a more expensive tape formulation to store an MPEG-2 digital data stream that could then be played back on compatible players.

D-VHS’s biggest benefit was that it had a much greater storage capacity than DVD, enabling you to either record and playback content and much higher bits rates (14.1Mpbs standard) than DVD was able to achieve (10Mpbs max.), or to use it as a carrier for high definition content.

A standard 240-minute tape, for example, had a capacity of 25GB (the same as Blu-ray and HD DVD) and was able to record up to four hours of ‘standard definition’ content at better than DVD quality bit-rates, or up to two hours of actual 720-line high definition content. Later tapes had even more capacity, offering up to 480 minutes recording in ‘standard def’, four hours in high-def. They also had a total storage capacity of 50GB.

Despite the fact that D-VHS was also backed by Panasonic, Hitachi and Toshiba, it really was still-born at birth. High prices, the rise of Sky+ style PVRs and the fact that people were now used to disc-based formats all conspired to kill off D-VHS before it ever really gained a foothold.

As ever it was a few obsessive cinephiles who ever got into it at all, and then chiefly as a way to get HD content before HD DVD and Blu-ray finally arrived here in 2006.

The only D-VHS deck to sell here (the HM-DR10000EK) did have the advantage that it was able to record to regular S-VHS cassettes, but the lack of an RGB input via SCART limited its appeal even further.

6. Vinyl

Like the bad guy in a zombie flick, vinyl is the format that just refuses to die. Every few years, it looks like it’s finally bitten the dust, only then it magically revives itself and the battle starts again.

We were supposed to be rid of the grooved plastic platters in the mid-1980s when CD swaggered in. However music lovers have stuck to their guns, and clung preciously on to the format, praising the warmth of its analogue output, and its sheer superiority when it comes to outright sound quality.

CD's alleged inferiority hasn’t been helped, of course, by the dirty tricks recording engineers and producers have resorted to to compressing a song’s dynamic range so it sounds better on the radio. 

Compression like this has always gone on, but it’s accelerated in the CD age to such an extent that it has made many recordings practically unlistenable, thanks to their bright and rapidly-wearing presentation.

True consumer tech companies like Sony have tried to deliver the best of both worlds with high-resolution audio formats like Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio (more on these below).

Vinyl has also been largely been absolved of another CD sin, that of artists willingness to fill every minute of CD’s 74-80 minute playing time with filler that should have been left in the songwriters’ scrapbook. It’s an accident of technology history that some of the best albums ever made have been just 30 to 40 minutes long (we'll gloss over the triple album excesses of the '70s - a precursor of the CD age).

Vinyl’s continuously undead state has been helped along the way, of course. First there was the DJ cult that flourished in clubs in the late 1980s and 1990s, where many a club classic made its debut on white label 12-inch singles. Those two decades also saw the rise of the indie singles club, where new releases were sent out to subscribers on scratchy 7-inchers.

The mainstream music biz then embraced vinyl again in the early noughties. This was out of necessity rather than invention - it found that by sending preview singles and albums to music papers and magazines on vinyl rather than CD, it took rather longer for ripped versions of those tracks to mysteriously appear on the internet.

The enduring quality of vinyl continues to make its presence felt today. Some of the world’s hottest bands still insist on releasing their new work on vinyl, and some enterprising labels are teaming the vinyl release with the MP3 version, so you don’t need to rip the songs yourself.

Vinyl also has a chic, retro appeal - the sheer physicality of putting taking a record out of its sleeve, putting it on your turntable and placing the needle down on the groove is a special moment.

It reinforces the bond between you and the music. It turns music into a special event - it asks that you listen, rather just treat music as a commodity. It stopt it being mere background noise to fill to the silence with.

And the joy of vinyl isn’t just confined to the old farts who nod sagely along to organ music at high-end hi-fi shows. Even the young are loving it, as a recent article in Wired proves.

And the two AV formats that deserved to die are...

Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio

The AV industry is all in a tizzy. Sony, Philips and friends have lined up on one side, Toshiba, Panasonic and co. are aligned on the other. Both are touting a new high definition format that promises to unseat the current and very loved incumbent.

Yup, in the 1990s the Sony / Philips Super Audio CD (SACD) format fought it out against Toshiba’s DVD-Audio for a tiny percentage of the high-end audio market that no-one in the mainstream really gave a stuff about. Superior sound quality? Pah. Have you heard about this thing called MP3?

In truth both formats had their merits, but multi-channel sound (it’s like quadrophonic, man) and the ability to display music and lyrics on your TV weren’t either of them.

Yes, the increased capacity of both formats (which used the DVD-Video format as their starting point) did result in better sound quality - but audiophiles knew they already had that with vinyl (whose rumours of death had been greatly exaggerated).

What was worse was that both Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio were festooned with DRM (marking the opening volleys of that particular battle) and had an audio catalogue conspicuous for its lack of almost anything resembling mainstream artists.

In Sony’s defence SACD at least tried to approach the mainstream with hybrid CD/SACD discs that played in ordinary CD players. But that also revealed SACD and DVD-Audio’s fatal flaw:

When push came to shove your average listener simply couldn’t tell the difference in sound quality between the new high resolution formats and regular CD, making the fierce battle between the two rival formats moot.

That’s a lesson Sony may yet learn to its cost with Blu-ray: superior sound and picture quality does not necessarily a successful format make.

Do you miss HD DVD, laserdisc and MiniDisc? Or so do you think they all deserved to die? Let us know, add your comments below!

High-definition TVs are everywhere but the vast majority of what people watch on them is still old fashioned standard-def material. There are now plenty of choices for getting spectacular HD content onto the screen, not least of which is Blu-ray.

However, there are also lots of HD movies on Sky, you can upscale any DVD to near-HD levels of quality and there's the promise of Freeview HD by 2012. Blu-ray might have won the format war, but is a Blu-ray player really worth getting?

"No," says Ian Calcutt

Blu-ray is not the only way to enjoy an HD quality picture. A good upscaling DVD player (like the Denon DVD-1730 ) will cost a fraction of the price of a next-gen disc spinner, even producing 1080p resolutions in some cases. DVD is hardly about to die out.

Blu-ray hardware is expensive. It's all very well if you're a gamer and have a PlayStation 3 (by far the best Blu-ray player, by the way), but home cinema buffs have to pay over the odds for a decent standalone player.

Ok, so the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD did create consumer confusion. But the competition did drive hardware prices down to almost ludicrously low levels. Did you know that since HD DVD bowed out, prices of some Blu-ray players have actually gone up?!

HD DVD was pretty finalised as a spec, but Blu-ray's hardware and software are still evolving. Some older Blu-ray players have no Ethernet ports for accessing upgrades and interactive disc features via broadband. Many also lack outputs to make the most of the picture and sound that discs can deliver. Some players don't support 7.1 channel audio and many don't meet the latest v1.3 spec of HDMI , allowing for better colour and lip-sync. Don't buy a Blu-ray player unless it supports the full Profile 2.0 spec.

You can get HD movies, sport, drama and documentaries from satellite and cable TV. Both platforms also use PVR technology for on-demand HD viewing.

Finally, the internet will become an increasingly important way to deliver HD. So, unless you really must build up a collection of discs on your shelf, why do you even need another disc player? Microsoft's Xbox Live already offers HD downloads to subscribers and you should expect other download services (including Apple's iTunes) to follow suit in the future. Why do we need another disc format, when digital delivery is obviously the next big thing?

"Yes," says Matt Hastings

Blu-ray won the high-def disc war, so it's the only way to watch true HD movies on your TV (unless you're a Sky HD or Virgin Media subscriber).

Even the best upscaling DVD players are no match for genuine HD source material. Why stick with DVD's dated video system (based on very lossy MPEG-2 compression) and rely on an upscaler's guesswork at what bits of the image are missing? Get the whole thing for real on Blu-ray disc. For those movies you still own on DVD, Blu-ray players upscale too, so you get the best of both worlds.

The average TV is getting bigger as technology improves and relative prices come down. Normal DVD pictures are going to start looking increasingly worse in the months and years to come. As a delivery system for HD, Blu-ray is a natural fit for big TVs.

Blu-ray can support films in the higher quality 1080p progressive scan format. Some players also offer a 24 frames-per-second output for as close a match to the original cinema copy as possible. You don't get 1080p with HDTV broadcasts and HD DVD players are not yet 24fps-compatible.

The audio capabilities of Blu-ray also far exceed those of DVD. Lossless high-end formats such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD are making movies sound as good as they did to the engineers in the mastering suite.

Like computer memory, you rarely realise how much you're going to want until you're outgrowing your system. At 50GB, Blu-ray has the highest capacity among disc-based media. And its future potential for storing top-notch pictures and high-bandwidth sound is currently unbeatable. Blu-ray can also be put to many other uses, from HD computer games on Sony's PS3 to backing up massive amounts of PC data.

Amazon.com announced on Wednesday that anyone who purchased an HD DVD player from the retailer will be offered a $50 (£25) credit to be used at any time on the company's website. The news follows the death of the format back in February when Toshiba finally announced it was pulling out of the HD DVD business.

Citing its "value for customer relationships", Amazon sent an email to shoppers to inform them of the credit. Anyone who purchased an HD DVD player through its American online store before 23 February is eligible for the credit, which can be redeemed at any time between now and 9 April 2009.

Giving something back

"New technologies don't always work out as planned," the company wrote in a letter to customers. "We at Amazon.com value our customer relationships more than anything and would like to support customers who purchased these players by offering a credit good for $50 off any products sold by Amazon.com."

Amazon's decision to offer the credit doesn't come as a surprise, with many major retailers like Wal-Mart having already initiated similar programmes. Considering that none of these retailers actually needed to make such a gesture though, it's nice to see them give something back.

Anyone who thought Toshiba got off lightly in terms of face saved and avoiding throwing good money after bad when it pulled the plug on its HD DVD business last month will probably want to think again when looking at the scale of the financial loss it caused.

Rock-solid rumours coming from Japan say that the Tokyo firm is set to warn investors that it will write off a loss of ¥100 billion, or almost half a billion pounds, on HD DVD this financial year.

Losses doubled

Toshiba still expects full-year profits of ¥250 billion (£1.2 billion). But the fact that it's a public company with shareholders expecting far better numbers makes the larger-than-forecast HD DVD loss significant.

Thursday trading in Tokyo currently has Toshiba stock down almost 3 per cent compared to yesterday. The company had expected to lose ¥50 billion on HD DVD this year even if it had stayed in the market.

Anyone familiar with the conservative nature of big Japanese business will tell you that Toshiba’s decision to drop HD DVD like a hot brick was almost unseemly in its haste, even though the firm had little choice.

Instead of slowly running down production and sales, Toshiba CEO Atsutoshi Nishida went straight for the jugular last month. He put the whimpering format out of its misery, but what’s next for the hard-man boss after such a high-profile failure?

Standard DVD

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Nishida explained that Toshiba will switch focus to standard DVD players and even suggested that Blu-ray will struggle.

He said: “What people don't realise is that Hollywood studios are going to release new titles not just for Blu-ray but for standard DVDs as well, and there are a far greater number of current-generation DVD players out there.”

Upscaling players

That’s all very well, but isn’t the fact that DVD machines are as cheap as chips a bit of a problem? Apparently not: “If you watch standard DVDs on our players, the images are of very high quality because they include an upconverting feature. And we're going to improve this even more, so that consumers won't be able to tell the difference from HD DVD images.”

While Nishida clearly has nerves of steel, it’s hard to see many people who want to watch high-quality video not actually buying a high-definition machine. It just doesn’t make sense.

Although he’s clearly banking on a price difference in favour of his players, it won’t be long before Blu-ray decks hit the price sweet-spot that made DVD a must-buy product a few years ago.

In spite of the demise of the format, HD DVD owners will still get the chance to purchase new high-definition releases for their lame-duck players because of an existing agreement.

Cash in hand

DreamWorks intends to honour the deal it agreed last August to release its films only on HD DVD, even though its sister studio, Paramount, has already switched sides to join the Blu-ray camp.

Although the decision to persevere with HD DVD in the short term may appear ludicrous, it actually makes some financial sense. Both Blu-ray and HD DVD markets are still so small, the DreamWorks share of the $150 million (£70 million) promised by Toshiba in return for support is likely to be far more than it could take in sales of high-def movies anyway.

Even though we've heard of some fantastic customer service for Japanese early adopters of the failed HD DVD format, it seems not everyone's happy with the brave face being put on by Toshiba.

In fact, a new survey by Nikkei Publications has found that almost half of respondents think Toshiba should never even have bothered with HD DVD in the first place.

Get out early

Asked, "At what point do you think Toshiba should have decided to withdraw from the HD DVD business?" 43 per cent said it should have done so in 2005 when it was still in talks with the backers of Blu-ray about finding a common high-definition format.

The poll of almost 1,000 Japanese geeks offered some small consolation for Toshiba in that just under 30 per cent backed its choice to wait until now to pull the plug.

Better yet, just under half of the technology and finance publisher's readers felt that the format war wasn't all bad news. A healthy 47 per cent said that "the format competition accelerated technical progress".

Although we promise not to bore you with too many stories about the demise of HD DVD this week, there's an intriguing conspiracy theory about the Blu-ray victory that's worth a quick look.

It concerns the suggestion that a recent deal done in Japan between Toshiba and Sony was somehow connected to the former's decision to stop making HD DVD hardware.

Chips with everything

In the immediate aftermath of HD DVD's demise, Sony announced the value of a deal that gave Toshiba its chip-making plants in west Japan for over £400 million. The new Toshiba plants will supply Cell processors and graphics chips for the PS3 as well as parts to various Toshiba items.

Although the sale was negotiated last October, the price was not revealed until after Toshiba agreed to give up on its high-definition format. Conspiracy or coincidence - you decide.

Japan's Mitsubishi Electric has come up with an unusual technique for boosting the resolution of high-definition video by combining shots from multiple ordinary cameras into one super HD stream.

The unnamed technology [Subscription link] is currently being tested at the company's labs in Tokyo using five video cameras capable of shooting high-quality images. It links these to computers with 3D graphics processors that can get to work on the raw data.

4x high-def

Input from the various cameras is analysed for differences, which are mashed together to form a composite video including everything at a much higher resolution.

With the current set-up of five cameras and five PCs the resulting video clocks in at quadruple the resolution of normal HD TV and is pumped out the other end just 0.15 seconds after the shooting begins.

Mitsubishi claims the quality is on a par with commercial digital cinema and says it hopes to use the technology in surveillance systems and possibly even in live TV broadcasts.

Amid the rush to wring the last few pennies out of HD DVD's rancid and yellowing corpse, at least one retailer has had the decency to front up and look after its unfortunate customers. Only problem is, it's in Japan.

Edion, the owner of several chains of electronics shops there, has taken the unusual step of extending the hand of sympathy to anyone who bought an HD DVD player or recorder from it. It's offering to exchange the useless machines for new Blu-ray devices.

Cash back too

Throughout March, customers can return any of seven Toshiba HD DVD decks and swap them for a BD unit from Sony, Panasonic or Sharp. If the latter is more expensive, customers need to make up the balance, but if it's cheaper they'll actually get a refund of the difference.

Edion's press release was refreshingly forthright about the HD DVD situation. It gave the reason for the exchange programme as the fact that "[HD DVD] customers can no longer use their purchases properly".

Extending the largesse even further, the company also promised to keep selling HD DVD movies and blank disks to anyone who needs them. Now that's the kind of customer service we could do with in the West.

According to Toshiba, it is undecided what to do about HD DVD drives in notebooks. TechRadar attended Toshiba’s UK press launch in lovely Hertfordshire this morning and found that it hadn’t quite made its mind up.

Tosh has been a bit silent on the subject of HD drives in its lappies over the past few days, pushing us from pillar to post in our quest to find the truth. But at the launch this morning, Olivier Van Wynendaele, deputy general manager of HD DVD at Toshiba, elaborated on the subject – if only a little. He said the corporation had “not yet decided” on its HD DVD strategy for notebooks since the corporation pulled the plug on the format.

Whether to persevere with a dead format

Presumably it will have to ponder whether to strip them from the spec of existing models or persevere with pending replacement models coming on to the market.

Now, unfortunately due to non-disclosure agreements, we can’t elaborate on the IT products shown at the launch this morning, but we’re sure you can imagine the kind of computing-based products they might be. However, Tosh was tight-lipped on whether any of them would contain HD DVD drives.

The first Toshiba notebook to incorporate an HD DVD drive was the Qosmio G30 back in 2006.

Check back later as we’ll have details on other product announcements from the launch.

Such is the lack of interest in Toshiba’s HD DVD players these days that retailers are going to extreme lengths to shift stock. We noticed this morning that not only has Play.com cut HD DVD player prices to an all-time low, but it’s also renamed the products - presumably in a bid to attract customers.

Instead of being listed as HD DVD players, they are now being displayed as upscaling DVD players which just happen to also have the bonus of being able to play back HD DVD discs.

Humiliation for last-remaining Toshiba players

The ‘Toshiba HD-EP30 HD DVD player’ has become the ‘Toshiba HD-EP30 HDMI Upscaling DVD Player with HD DVD High Definition Playback’. The same is true of the other Toshiba HD DVD players in the range – all have been re-labelled.

Incidentally, the HD-EP30 is now available on the site for just £79.99 and comes with two free HD DVD movies. Consequently, the player is currently the fifth best-selling electronics product on the site.

Our buddies over at T3 spoke to Play this morning, which said that it has also seen a seven-fold increase in sales of Blu-ray players. The Samsung BD-P1400, the cheapest BD player on the site at £199, is now in the electronics Top 20 also.

"We are pleased that the industry is moving to a single high-definition format, as we believe it is in the best interest of the consumer," the statement reads. "As we look to (begin) releasing our titles on Blu-ray, we will monitor consumer adoption and determine our release plans accordingly," Paramount told the Hollywood Reporter.

Bargain bin

The implosion of the HD DVD format is also spilling over into retail stores. Circuit City in the US is currently offering Toshiba HD DVD players and seven HD DVD movies all for just $99 (£51).

Should you happen to be one of those people who arranges the books on their shelves alphabetically, you'll probably like the new recordable media from Panasonic that allow you to record the summer Olympics on Olympic-branded disks.

The official Olympic video media go on sale in Japan in April and versions will be available in other territories around the same time.

The choice includes different-sized packs of Blu-ray BD-R, BD-R DL (dual layer), BD-RE (re-recordable), BD-RE DL disks as well as DVD-R and DVD-RAM selections.

Alas, for anyone who happened to make a very unfortunate high-definition buying decision in the recent past, there won't be any HD DVD disks. Aw...