Sony Introduces New Blu-ray Disc Players
Sony has announced its timeline for refreshing its Blu-ray Disc player line. At its product showcase today in Las Vegas, the company showed its BDP-S350 and BDP-S550 models. Sony showed prototypes at the International Consumer Electronics Show in January, but they didn't announce a timeline or model numbers at that time.
The BDP-S350 will ship in the summer, and will cost $400; the BDP-S550 will ship in the fall for about $500. Both players will support Bonus View for viewing picture-in-picture content, both have an external port for adding local storage. Sony says the BDP-S350 is BD Live-ready; it has an ethernet port, but you will need to add your own storage, and do a firmware upgrade to add full support for this feature. The BDP-S550 will ship with 1GB of storage--as required for BD Live--and will not require a firmware upgrade to enable the interactivity features.
Both players handle 7.1-channel Dolby TrueHD decoding and bitstream output, and DTS-HD Master Adio bistream output. The higher-end BDP-S550 adds DTS-HD Master Audio decoding as well as 7.1 channel analog audio output.
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Pricing is still ridiculous. This format will lose in the end if prices dont change.
Pricing is a lot more reasonable than the first DVD players that hit the market back in 1998. For example the Panasonic DVD-A310 originally sold for $700 and the Denon DVD-3000 sold for $1,200. Consider inflation and the fact that these were average costs for high performance DVD players almost 10 years ago I would say that a $400 - $500 price tag is reasonable for a newer technology. When Sony first released their Blu-ray player the cost was around $1,300. So in the timeframe off less than a year we are already seeing the cost for the Blu-ray players drop by more than 50 percent.
I’m looking forward to getting one but I’m not sure if ill pick up one of the newer Blu-ray players mentioned above or a PS3. I’ve read somewhere that the PS3 is upgradeable to the BD live-ready format via a firmware upgrade, but does anyone know if there are any video or audio features that make these newer Blu-ray players better than the PS3?
Hey Joe, Im a computer Science Engineer and my technical opinion on the matter is that the PS3 is mainly a Blu-Ray disc player, all PS3 games are made on Blu-ray discs. Also, The PS3 has three processing units, one og them the AWESOME CELL processor, while the regular players only have one. The PS· is designed for HD TV's so it would be accurate to say that it has HD audio features besides and the other features that the regular players dont have... so if you are into games and want a console and a blu-ray player then get a PS3 i highly recommend it. I hope this information was useful Joe08. For more information about the CELL processor ask wikipedia
Bluray player and PS3 are practically the same.. only you can play video games on the PS3 and has large storage HDD... so in the long run the PS3 is cheaper than the Bluray player, because the PS3 has more things than the bluray and both cost the same
who in the world would pay thousands just to play a DVD it don't record
Just a projection....Prices will com down,,,Even better...Old players
will be cheaper too.
If you like to play Games then get PS3
If you just want to watch movies then get Blu-Ray player.
Enjoy the movie.....