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Toshiba had a lot of announcements to make today at their CES press conference.  Here are some of the highlights.

Their announcements fell into 4 main categories: monitors, set-top boxes, camcorders, MP3 players, and HD-DVD players.  Obviously HD-DVD was the main event… so we’ll end with that!  We’ll start out with monitors.  One in particular was their new 55” SED.  In case you’re wondering, SED stands for Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display.  This will be the year of LEDs and projection TVs, as Toshiba will introduce over 25 new models just in 2006.  Amazing!  They also mentioned that they’re working to reduce the “form factor” of their TV lineup.  The set-top box that they mentioned, the Gigastyle RD-XS55, is a 250 GB PVR and DVD burner with 720 to 1080 up conversion built in.

Next up is camcorders… AKA Gigashot.  They introduced their new camcorders with built-in hard drives.  The new Gigashot comes in 30 GB and 60 GB configurations which will run $729 and $999 respectively.

Their Gigabeat line will also get a new Flash DAP.  The audio players will sport a nice 1.1” OLED display and will come in 512MB and 1 GB models.  They will be $119 and $149.

And here’s the main attraction… the HD-DVD news.  Toshiba announced 2 HD-DVD players
that will be released in 2006.  The HD-XA1 and the HD-A1.  We couldn’t catch all of the specs, but the XA1 is decked out with a bunch more features.  The A1 will cost $499 and the XA1 will cost $799.  On one of their slides they had pictures of Batman Begins and Vanilla Sky… so maybe they’ll be the first ones to hit.  Toshiba also has new “Qosmio” notebook computers coming out with built-in HD-DVD ROM drives.

We’ll have more news and press conference news as it pours in… so stay tuned.

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