Pioneer's New Blu-ray Devices

Salivating for Blu-ray? You'd better start saving, too: Pioneer announced its living room Blu-ray Disc Player Elite BDP-HD1, due out in June, is slated to cost a whopping $1800.

The unit will deliver 1920 x 1080p high-definition output, and has IP networking and DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance)-compliant connectivity. The latter means you can use the BDP-HD1 to load protected content stored on a DLNA-compliant server or Windows XP PC using Windows Media Connect. Among the audio formats it supports, the unit can handle DTS-HD and Dolby Digital, as well as MP3, LPCM, and WMA files.

Pioneer also has announced its BDR-101A (no pricing as yet), the first half-height Blu-ray Disc burner for PCs. Pioneer is targeting this model at the disc-authoring community, but expects early adopters eager for the removable media capacity offered by 25GB Blu-ray discs will gravitate towards the recorder as well.

The recorder can write to write-once BD-R and rewritable BD-RE, as well as to DVD-R/+R and DVD-RW/+RW; its lack of CD burning is deliberate in this first iteration.