Japan's Toshiba Corp. said on Tuesday it had developed the world's first PC able to read HD DVD discs, a next-generation disc format it is promoting over a rival standard pushed by Sony Corp..

Toshiba and Sony, leading rival camps, have waged a three-year battle to have their different standards adopted for the next-generation of DVDs, which promise much greater capacity for high-definition movies reports Reuters.

Toshiba, along with NEC Corp. and Sanyo Electric Co., has been promoting HD DVD, while Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic brand products, have been developing a technology known as Blu-ray.

September 26, Intel and Microsoft announced their support for HD-DVD. The need for a new standard is apparent. People are buying High-Definition television sets, and as should be immediately obvious to anyone who has seen the same video displayed side by side in standard-definition and high-definition format reports ZDNET.

Toshiba, said the PC would be introduced in Japan in early 2006. It is still considering the timing for an overseas launch.

The PC will be equipped with a slim, read-only HD DVD drive produced by Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology, a joint venture between Japan's second-largest electronics conglomerate and South Korea's Samsung Electronics.