Scheduled to ship in June in the US at a street price of $999 the new BD 50 and a BD 100 home theatre offering from Panasonic is set to go up against recently announced Samsung home theatre offerings which also comes with a Blu ray player. No prices have been announced in Australia from either Company.
According to TWICE in the USA the Panasonic offering will be the company's first stand-alone player with embedded decoders for all of the optional surround-sound formats authorized for use on BD discs. The optional formats are Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital TrueHD, DTS-HD High Resolution, DTS-HD Master and 7.1-channel 96kHz/24-bit PCM.
The BD50 also complies with the Blu-ray 2.0 profile (a.k.a. BD Live), whose bi-directional capability lets players download additional extras content via an Ethernet connection for playback. It also enables interactive applications such as playing video games over the Internet or engaging in online polling and ordering.
On the BD50, downloaded content is played back from an optional SD memory card, inserted in the player's front panel, instead of building the profile-2.0 spec-required 1GB of memory into the player.
