CeBIT Toshiba will bring its mid-range, 1080p HD DVD player to Europe in May, the consumer electronics giant said today. Dubbed the HD-EP10 over here, the box was launched in the US in January as the HD-A20.

The HD-EP10 builds on the already available base-line model, the HD-E1 with support for the highest HD resolution but without many of the more high-end audio features found on the top-of-the-line HD-XE1.

The new model can play content on all the established CD and DVD formats, upscaling standard-definition to HD - provided you have an HDTV hooked up to the player's HDMI port. It also sports s-video, composite-video and component-video ports, along with analogue and digital audio, and a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port.

The HD-EP10 is set to arrive in the shops in May, priced at around €699 ($925/£478).

Bootnote What do we find tucked away in the small print of Toshiba's HD-EP10 press release? "Because HD DVD is a new format that makes use of new technologies, certain disc, digital connection and other compatibility and/or performance issues are possible. This may, in rare cases, include disc freezing while accessing certain disc features or functions, or certain parts of the disc not playing back or operating as fully intended."

To be fair, the same may be true of Blu-ray Disc, and Toshiba does offer its help fixing such "issues". But it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in HD media, does it? Weren't consumer electronics products supposed to just work and not suffer from all this computery crashing business? Ah, progress...