Toshiba plans to begin selling a DVD player based on the new technology within 6 months, Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported citing unnamed sources at Toshiba. The new enhanced DVD players will be sold at lower prices than Blu-ray players & will be backwards-compatible with standard DVD discs.

Toshiba 1st competed Blu-ray with its own HD-DVD video disc standard, but they decided to pull the plug of their HD DVD format this year, because too many Movie companies decided to choose the Blu-ray format.

One Japanese report appeared to suggest that the new technology would be able produce much higher-resolution images from existing DVDs, but did not address the apparent impossibility of this claim.

The modified DVD format relies on a newly-developed large scale integrated circuit chip to rapidly convert the stored video, but no technical details were released.

Manufacturers have attempted to extend the lifespan of existing storage technologies by adding additional data which can be used by new players but ignored by older players. For example, hybrid Super Audio CDs (SACDs) can be played in traditional CD players but produce higher quality audio when played in special players.