The BDP-S550 was the first player announced after the end of the format war (back in February) but it is only scheduled to be released in the fall for about $500. This will be one of the few available players with profile 2.0 (Maybe until its release we will see more). I have to say that it looks very cool with its blue-ish color and not as chunky as others currently on the market. Hopefully Sony did a better job and this will be a better player, considering that the BDP-S300 was SSLLLOOOOOW. The BDP-S550 will be competing against the Panasonic DMP-BD50, which we posted on March 31st.

This model offers 7.1 channel Dolby® TrueHD and Dolby® Digital Plus decoding and bit-stream output, as well as dts-HD High Resolution Audio and dts-HD Master Audio decoding as well as 7.1 channel analog audio output. It supports AVCHD discs encoded with x.v.Color^TM (xvYCC) technology, an international standard for wide color space reproduction. The standard expands the current data range of video by about 1.8 times, allowing the players to output more natural and vivid colors similar to what the human eye can actually see. The player also features compatibility with an array of video formats, 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.

Key features

• Supports BonusView, which means it is Profile 1.1 compliant and BD-Live Profile 2.0
• 1GB local storage
• Ethernet port for firmware upgrades
• Supports 1080p output at both 24 and 60 frames per second
• Onboard decoding for Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD High Resolution and DTS-HD Master Audio
• 7.1 analog outputs
• Bitstream output for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio

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