Sony Finally Unveils Two Blu-ray Players with Support for BonusView and BD-Live

Now that the format war is finally over, Sony can roam free on the High Definition field with its beloved Blu-ray format soon to arrive in just about every HD adopter's home. And this is the reason why the company has decided to let out two new players, namely the BDP-S350 and BDP-S550 models, which will be capable of accessing advanced interactive features such as BonusView and BD-Live.

"Building on the exceptional picture and sound quality of previous players, Sony’s next-generation Blu-ray Disc models bring exciting interactive features to life and offer consumers a ground-breaking experience," said Chris Fawcett, vice president of marketing for Sony Electronics’ Home Product Division. "These new devices bring home movie experience beyond the cinema and into a whole new realm of entertainment."

While Mr. Fawcett's statement smells like PR c**p from a mile away (after all, HD DVD players already had built-in interactivity features, while Sony struggled to get there for quite a long period of time), the truth of the matter is that Sony's new players do offer a breath of fresh air for all Blu-ray fans.

Thus, beside the support for the aforementioned interactivity options, Sony's players also offer other attractive features as well. For example, both models also feature an external port for local storage, so users can add optional flash-based memory, while the BDP-S550 even ships with a 1GB storage device.

Moreover, the players feature 1080/60p and 24p True Cinema output and are compatible with most standard DVDs, providing 1080p upscaling through an HDMI connection to capable HDTV sets. Additionally, the models offer 7.1 channel Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus decoding and bit-stream output, as well as dts-HD High Resolution Audio and Master Audio bit-stream output. However, the more advanced BDP-S550 also adds dts-HD High Resolution Audio and dts-HD Master Audio decoding as well as 7.1 channel analog audio output.

It's also important to note that the players support AVCHD discs encoded with x.v.Color (xvYCC) technology, an international standard for wide color space reproduction. They are also compatibility with an array of video formats, including BD-R/RE (BDMV and BDAV modes), DVD+R/+RW, DVD-R/-RW (Video Mode), CD, CD-R/RW (CD-DA format), and JPEG on DVD//CD recordable media.

Unfortunately, those people willing to either switch from HD DVD to Blu-ray or simply finally go HD will have to wait some more before they can actually purchase Sony's new players. Thus, the new BDP-S350 is supposed to arrive in shops this summer for about $400, while the BDP-S550 is slated for an autumn release, for around $500.

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