Sony's new Blu-ray players feature-packed, but still high priced

Sony pressed ahead with its Blu-ray plans Tuesday, announcing two new players coming this year, but still at prices above what most consumers are willing to pay.

The BDP-S350 will ship this summer for $400 USD, and the BDP-S550 in the fall before the holiday season for $500 USD. The S350 will ship with Blu-ray Profile 1.1, also known as BonusView, but will include an Ethernet port so it can be upgraded to Profile 2.0 -- or BD-Live -- when the new firmware is ready.

The S550 will ship once the Profile 2.0 firmware is ready, so customers won't need to upgrade the player themselves.

Sony has slimmed down the players, which are now coming in at a size more comparable to that of DVD players. The company said it designed the players in mind to be paired with new Blu-ray-focused home theater packages. Sony did not specify whether boot-up times have been increased, which has been a major complaint among buyers of both Blu-ray and HD DVD players.

In addition, both include an Ethernet port, external port for extra storage, 1080/60p and 24p True Cinema output, 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.

The BDP-S550 adds a 1GB storage device for storing BD-Live data, dts-HD High Resolution Audio and dts-HD Master Audio decoding, as well as 7.1 channel analog audio output.

Sony's players will be able to play a range of discs beyond Blu-ray, including BD-R/RE (BDMV and BDAV modes), DVD+R/+RW, DVD-R/-RW, CD, CD-R/RW (CD-DA format), and JPEG on DVD/CD recordable media.