Looks like Toshiba’s not taking the whole Blu-ray win in the format war lying down.

While they’ve been promising a Blu-ray player for quite some time now, it looks like they’re hedging their bets on the whole thing by producing a line of standard definition equipment too.

Their slate of releases includes three models of a DVD player / recorder / DVR, with varying levels of storage all the way up to two terabytes of onboard space and starting at three hundred twenty gig.  Naturally, as some have pointed out, the chances of us seeing this little fella in the United States thanks to our copyright law is slim to nil, but the possibility does remain.  They’re looking to be sold only in Japan starting this September.

And of course, I’m all sorts of unhappy about this.  For crying out loud, how many sweet pieces of hardware are we going to be forced to miss out on because our government wants to protect corporations ahead of us?  But this is just a gripe against the overall fact–why is Toshiba hedging its bets like this?  Maybe it’s a critical commentary on the viability of Blu-ray as a medium, either in the short term or the long term.  Sure, Blu-ray looks fantastic if you’ve got all the necessary components required to view it, but for crying out loud, some of this stuff costs a fortune, and these days everyone’s watching their pennies.

Toshiba may have the right idea after all….