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Originally Posted by Iguana Man
That's still a lot of money for many people.
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The BD50 is going to be $499 from what I've heard, but it will still be the best player under $1500 if things all pan out right
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Forgive me, but in a nutshell, what exactly does the 2.0 final spec bring to the table vs. the 1.0?
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1.0 = Basic/Audio Video. Basically standard DVD with hidef capability.
1.1 = Advanced offline interactivity, i.e. IME, U-Control, PiP, etc
2.0 = Online interactivity, i.e. downloads, online firmware updates, etc
Also, and this is a huge point for BD players, all of the 1.0 players are ungodly slow - slower than the original Toshiba HD-A1, we are talking 30sec to start then 2+ min to load some BD-J movies - while 1.1+ players seem to be much, much speedier.
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It sounds like you are set on this player so I look forward to your future review.
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Yep, but I can review it now before I get it as Panasonic has made clear what the BD50 is. The BD50 will be the BD30 minus the LFE bug, with Profile 2.0/Online support and all nextgen audio codecs decoders builtin + analog 5.1 added into the mix. This will apparently all be added at the same $499 price point according to BD insiders, though I wouldn't be surprised if it were released at $599 given its demand. It will have even more features than the PS3 (PS3 lacks bitstreaming & DTS-HDMA decoding, and hasn't yet been upgraded to BD2.0) and will be very fast.
Bottom line, even if you won't use the BD2.0 functionality, the BD50 will be the first fully-featured player - likely for $500 - that could actually be seen as a better option than the HD-A35 or PS3.