If the diabolical, shadowy figures who run the electronics industry really cared about us, they’d invent everything all at once and then never invent anything new ever again. See, when DVDs first hit, we ran out and bought the most expensive DVD player we could find, figgerin’ we were set for life. Then along came HDTV, so we sold a few unnecessary internal organs on the Thai black market to buy the best one we could afford with the proceeds. But wait – what’s this? Our stalwart DVD player’s resolution isn’t up to HD standards? Curses! And we can’t afford a new one until we can somehow grow another spare kidney.

For now, we’ll make do with the Toshiba SD-k850 HD Upconverting Progressive Scan DVD Player with HDMI Out and DivX Playback. No, it doesn’t possess the mystical ability to conjure pixels where none exist. But it does a halfway-decent job of making its 480p progressive-scan output look like 720p or 1080i resolutions, and it’s got the HDMI output to bring the love to your HDTV. The jaw-droppingly-cheap package even includes an HDMI cable at no extra charge, so we can cancel that trip to the blood bank.

What’s more, the Toshiba SD-k850 is Divx-ready, Divx-willing, and Divx-able to play those downloaded videos clogging up our hard drive (assuming there aren’t any other format/compat issues, which there very well might be). And that’s just one ingredient in its multi-format parfait, which also includes DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3, WMA, and JPG flavors. Mmmm! Enjoy delicious media!

Sure, we were upset upon realizing the upheaval that an upsurge in upstart upgrades would stir up in our existing A/V setup. But along came the the Toshiba SD-k850 with upconversion to uphold our hookup – and the upshot is, we won’t have to pay up much to add it to our lineup. Onward and upward!

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