Toshiba Announces Blu-Ray Playing TVs

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Nobody likes clutter at their TV home media centers, and Toshiba is trying to help. Toshiba is adding two entries to their REGZA line of HDTVs that will both feature (iMac-style) slot-loading Blu-Ray players for your HD video enjoyment. It’ll even have USB ports so you can save recorded video to an external hard drive.

The two new models are the 32R1BDP and the 26R1BDP, which will come in 32-inch and 26-inches, respectively. They’ll both come in at a WXGA resolution (1,366 x 768) and will feature both digital and analog TV tuners. For ports, it’ll have HDMI, Ethernet and two LAN ports.

For AV fans, the large 32-inch one will have a 4,000:1 contrast ratio, with the 26-inch one having a 3,0001: contrast ratio, and they’ll have 10Wx2 and 5Wx2 speakers respectively for the larger and smaller units.

The Blu-Ray player will be able to play any sort of Blu-Ray disk you could want, from the regular Blu-Ray to BD-ROM; BD-R; BD-RE and on and on. Although Toshiba just introduced their first Blu-Ray recording set-top unit, the TVs unfortunately don’t support that feature.

What they do support, is that if you can connect an external HDD to the TV via the two USB ports, you can save video to the HDD. It will only record video from the TV tuners, so it can’t be used as an analog rip of some copyrighted Blu-Ray movies.

The TVs will ship in Japan first next month, as for pricing, they want $1,400 for the bigger one and $1,200 for the smaller one.