Harman Kardon announces price, date for BD player
updated 09:40 am EDT, Fri May 8, 2009
Harman Kardon BD player
Harman Kardon has recently announced it will soon release its first Blu-ray player, the BDP 10 (PDF). The device will have BonusView and BD-Live capability, allowing users to view extra online content associated with certain Blu-ray movies. The BDP 10 will have advanced audio codec support and will play back 1080/24p videos without pulldown conversion. It displays JPEG photos and DiVX videos burned to discs from external USB drives.
Harman Kardon, best known for its high-end home theater audio gear, unusually doesn't include multi-channel analog audio outputs for connecting directly to speakers, instead relying on digital. The level of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD support is unknown, although the BDP 10 will at least handle bitstream versions of these surround sound formats. As expected, the Profile 2.0 Blu-ray disc player will upscale DVDs to 1080p quality.
Connections include an HDMI 1.3a with x.v.Color output, component and RCA video outputs, an Ethernet jack, coaxial and optical audio outputs as well as traditional two-channel analog audio output.
The equivalent price for the player in Europe is $940, with the player releasing sometime in May in the European market only. A release date for North America is expected soon afterwards, but hasn't been announced. [via Blu-ray]
