Toshiba's XDE -- Trick or Treat?

I wrote an editorial a little while back about how upconverting standard-definition DVDs does not result in high-definition images, yet when Toshiba recently came out with its XDE (eXtended Detail Enhancement) DVD player, the XD-E500, I bought one of the first ones that Crutchfield sold, for around $150. I know XDE is not HD, but anything that might make my several thousand SD DVDs look better than they do is worth investigating.

The XD-E500 is small: 16.75"W x 7.125"D by just 2"H. It wasn’t designed to be stacked in a rack -- if that’s where you put it, it’ll have to go on top. Out of the box, it was a snap to connect and configure, and the setup menu is one of the simplest I’ve seen. It took some advice from the Logitech help line to get the Toshiba’s commands registered in my Harmony universal remote, but once I’d learned some of them, it was done very quickly. By now, Logitech no doubt has the necessary files in its database; you probably won’t have to go through the whole process.

The XD-E500’s instruction manual matches the player: at 7.25" by 5", it’s much smaller than the norm. Everything in this book is fine print, and it’s hard for older eyes to read without assistance. However, the manual has one great feature: The controls of the XD-E500 and its remote are coded to pages in the manual. If you see a button on the remote labeled Progressive and aren’t sure what it does, you can check it on the schematic diagram in the manual and be immediately referred to page 12. I hooked up the XD-E500 via HDMI and set it to output 1080i, my display’s native resolution.

The Toshiba loaded discs quickly and performed its play functions smoothly. Before I get into the XDE feature, there’s one thing I didn’t like: It’s impossible to set the XD-E500 to the correct 1.33:1 aspect ratio for Academy Standard films. This surprised me, because Toshiba’s XA2 HD DVD player does it extremely well: once the player is set up, it switches between 1.33:1 and widescreen formats without a hitch. I tried everything I could think of, adjusting both monitor and player, but the XD-E500 showed nothing but stretched, widescreen distortions of 4:3 images. I decided to use the XD-E500 only for widescreen films, and play 4:3 ones on my XA2.

The XDE features come with three settings: Sharpness, Color, and Contrast. Actually, all three use sharpness enhancement, but it’s impossible to combine Color and Contrast. No matter -- I found those settings absolutely useless. If your display has been properly set up using one of the Digital Essentials discs, you’ll only make its picture worse by using XDE Color or Contrast. Color punches up blues and greens to the point that they actually bleed, and Contrast so lightens dark scenes that true blacks are compromised.

Sharpness alone produces the desired effect, making the foregrounds of SD DVD images look a lot . . . sharper. The remarkable thing was that it made backgrounds sharper as well. But I found this effect very dependent on the source material. Playing Season 2 of Prison Break (available only on SD DVD), I was able to view some near-astonishing results and crisp images. But when I loaded the Blu-ray edition of Season 3 into my Samsung player, there was no doubt that the picture was even sharper and deeper than the XDE images. For older movies that are a bit soft to begin with, I found that the XA2, with its Reon chipset, was better than the XD-E500. And XDE will make transfers that have been subjected to too much edge enhancement almost unwatchable by making the defects sharper and clearer. But given a really good SD DVD, such as Prison Break, the Toshiba XD-E500 delivered the goods. Some other good SD DVDs worked well too, such as the Star Wars movies, and the newly remastered Flash Gordon.

It’s too bad that someone can’t make a player that does it all well. While my Samsung plays Blu-rays just fine, it doesn’t upconvert SD DVDs well at all, so I seldom, if ever, use it for that purpose. Toshiba’s XA2, as mentioned, does do a good job of upconverting SD DVDs, so that’s what I use, especially for 4:3 films. Though I bought it to play HD DVDs (which it does very well), the XA2 has become my DVD player. But, of course, the XA2 doesn’t play Blu-rays. And I have a Yamaha machine that plays multichannel SACDs and DVD-Audio discs.

To accommodate all these machines, I’ve had to buy a reasonably expensive switchbox. But shouldn’t there be one player for all? There are rumors of a Blu-ray player from Oppo that might be truly universal, playing BDs and upconverting SD DVDs, with SACD thrown in. Other players are coming -- from Sony, Denon, and elsewhere -- that do almost anything, but they’re pre-listed as costing two to three thousand dollars. My dream would be for Toshiba to make a Blu-ray player that incorporates the upsampling wizardry of its XA2, but that possibility seems remote.

Unless you currently have no upconversion at all, I’d wait. The XD-E500 does a nice job with many SD DVDs, but it’s no cure-all, and doesn’t play Blu-rays. I think that, by January 1, there will be a wide range of players in all price ranges that will both play Blu-ray and do a good job of upconverting SD DVDs. Treat yourself, but don’t be fooled by the new kid on the block just because, at the moment, he seems to be the only one. There will be others. Stay tuned.

. . . Rad Bennett
radb@hometheatersound.com

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