Sony today announced two new Blu-ray player models which will be out later this year. The BDP-S350 will be ‘BD-Live Ready’ when it ships this summer. It will have an Ethernet port and will get BD-Live enabled via a downloadable firmware update after release. The other model is the BDP-S550, which will be BD-Live enabled when it ships in the fall. Both will also be Bonus View enabled, aka Profile 1.1, when they ship, as all players must now be. To quote the press release specs:
The players feature 1080/60p and 24p True Cinema output. They are compatible with most standard DVDs and feature 1080p upscaling through an HDMI connection to capable HDTV sets, improving the picture performance of existing DVD libraries.
The models offer 7.1 channel Dolby(R) TrueHD and Dolby(R) Digital Plus decoding and bit-stream output, as well as dts(R)-HD High Resolution Audio and Master Audio bit-stream output. The BDP-S550 adds dts-HD High Resolution Audio and dts-HD Master Audio decoding as well as 7.1 channel analog audio output.
The players support AVCHD discs encoded with x.v.Color(TM) (xvYCC) technology, an international standard for wide color space reproduction. The standard expands the current data range of video by about 1.8 times, allowing the players to output more natural and vivid colors similar to what the human eye can actually see. The players also feature compatibility with an array of video formats, including BD-R/RE (BDMV and BDAV modes), DVD+R/+RW, DVD-R/-RW, CD, CD-R/RW (CD-DA format), and JPEG on DVD//CD recordable media.
The BDP-S350 will have an MSRP of about $400, and the BDP-S550 will have an MSRP of about $500. Personally, I think those prices will be lower by the time they ship. And, of course, they’ll be available for less online.
The full release:
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