With the dust finally settling after the prolonged HD format struggle and HD DVD’s recent demise, Sony is already pushing its newly crowned industry standard with the emergence of brand new Blu-ray players capable of hosting downloaded material.
Sony announces new Blu-ray players with download capabilities. Credit: Sony.
Announced by Sony during a press event on Tuesday, the upcoming BDP-S350 is expected to arrive during the summer of 2008 for approximately $400 USD and will enable users to watch downloadable media including movie trailers and even videogames.
The BDP-S350 will be the first player in Sony’s Blu-ray fleet to include an Ethernet port, which will allow it hook up to a home broadband connection, reports the Associated Press.
While equipped with an Ethernet connector, the player will not be Internet-enabled out of the box, but will require the user to accept and install Sony’s BD-Live (Blu-ray Profile 2.0) firmware upgrade before a live connection can be established.
Set to follow in the autumn of 2008 is the BDP-S550, which will arrive for around $500 USD and, unlike the BDP-S350, will be Internet-enabled from the outset while also equipped with 1GB of persistent memory.
Beyond Ethernet capabilities, the new slimmer form factor players will also be notable for being Sony’s first Blu-ray offerings equipped with picture-in-picture content via Bonus View.
Other features related to the BDP-S350 and BDP-S550 include 1080/60p and 24p True Cinema, 1080p DVD upscaling via HDMI, 7.1 channel Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus decoding, dts-HD High Resolution Audio and Master Audio bit-stream output, support for AVCHD discs, and compatibility with D-R/RE (BDMV and BDAV modes), DVD+R/+RW, DVD-R/-RW, CD, CD-R/RW (CD-DA format), and JPEG on DVD/CD.
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