Toshiba Shows Off VARDIA Line of Blu-Ray Players

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Toshiba revealed their plans to ship four new Blu-Ray players and two new HDTVs that featured internal Blu-Ray players. Of course, nothing special there, except the Blu-Ray players will feature internal HDDs. That’s nice, but nothing groundbreaking. Oh yeah, one of the new VARDIA players is taking it back to 1998 and including a VHS VCR integrated with the Blu-Ray player.

Toshiba, who was the parent company of the HD-DVD format, didn’t join the Blu-Ray Disc Association until mid-2009, so these players are still early in their Blu-Ray offerings. Of their four standalone player offerings, three of them will be equipped Blu-Ray recorders, with the high-end model (D-BW1005K) coming equipped with a VHS deck.

Why bother? Well, like DVD recorders that had VHS decks in the early 2000′s, this player will let you convert non-commercial VHS tapes to Blu-Ray – say, for example, old home movies made on 1990′s camcorders.

VHS isn’t the only draw of these players, three of them will feature either a 1TB or 320GB hard drive. That’s likely for storing media, not copying commercial movies, as most players with internal hard drives won’t allow you to do that.

To get your digital media onto the internal hard drives, the players will have a USB port and an SD card slot that will let you transfer your stuff over to the hard drive.

No word on pricing or a release date, but these players will only be coming to Japan at first. Americans and Europeans who have a craving for a HDMI-port enabled VHS VCR are out of luck for now. I’ve read some reports that a good D-VHS deck connected to a HDTV looks comparable to 720p DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, but I would be highly skeptical.