Or are they just clearing out their warehouses..?
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10486905

that's not a fight. that's rats on a sinking ship!

It'll only go to further the perception that the ship is sinking...

It's definitely a fire sale. Toshiba doesn't want to get stuck with a huge inventory of unsold machines, so this is a way to dump them onto poor, unsuspecting consumers before they catch on.

I talked to one knowledgeable, trusted salesman I deal with at Best Buy, and he said that many in the retail industry are now considering Toshiba's latest moves as blatantly anti-consumer. They just want them (HD-DUD) to go away so that there will be no more format confusion and the stores can get to selling Blu-ray's advantages over standard-definition DVDs, instead of the advantages over a rival and soon-to-be-dead HD format.