Today in NYC, Panasonic showed off its DMP-BD50, the company's first BD-Live
Blu-ray 2.0 player—and the second in the market besides the PlayStation 3—setting the price at $700. It's an improvement over the DMP-BD30, which will stay on the market as a $500 step-down. In addition to BD-Live (and the requisite Ethernet port), it will decode all new DTS and Dolby Digital codecs internally, as well as bitstream them to a compatible receiver, if that's your preference. The player,
initially announced at CES, will ship in "late spring," presumably the next 4-6 weeks, and will not need a firmware upgrade to be 2.0 compatible—a requirement of the
$400 Sony BDP-S350 player due out around the same time. Fact sheet after the jump.
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