14 DAY TRIAL // A week ago, we were reporting that an upcoming Blu-ray player from Samsung, then dubbed BD-P2550, had appeared on BestBuy's website, which meant that an official announcement from the Korean manufacturer was bound to follow shortly. And it looks like Samsung didn't want to keep us waiting for too long, since it has officially announced the release of the BD-P2500, a fifth-generation Blu-ray player that comes with all the possible bells and whistles, including here the most advanced options available for this particular brand of devices.
According to the company's statement, Samsung’s BD-P2500 meets all the current BD Profile requirements right out of the box, including here the latest interactive features available, like BD Live (Profile 2.0) and Bonus View (Profile 1.1). Additionally, the BD-P2500 comes with a built-in, wired Ethernet connection (for carrying out firmware updates), 1GB of internal flash memory and a USB port for memory expansion.
The image processing and playback features provided by the BD-P2500 are equally impressive. Hence, we're dealing with Full HD 1080p playback, as well as an HQV processing chip, which enables high quality viewing of Blu-ray discs (including a 24fps film mode), upconversion of standard DVDs, and viewing of JPEG images.
It's also important to point out that the new Samsung BD-P2500 is capable of decoding the latest high-resolution digital multichannel audio soundtracks available, being able to output Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and dts as an uncompressed PCM signal or as a bitstream.
Beside the aforementioned Ethernet and USB interfaces, the new player from Samsung also sports 1 HDMI version 1.3 output with CEC (Anynet+), Component and Composite outputs, 7.1-Channel analog audio outputs and 1 optical digital audio output.
Unlike most of the announcements from IFA, in the case of the BD-P2500 we've also got some pricing and availability data. Thus, the Blu-ray player is slated to arrive in stores at some point in October and will sell for an estimate 500 US dollars (but you'll probably be able to find it for a lot less during the Christmas shopping season).
We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is 
.