IFA 2007: Samsung officially launches BD-UP5000 Blu-ray HD DVD player

Hybrid players gets Euro intro, still no pricing confirmed

31 August 2007 3:02 GMT / By Stuart Miles

We've known about Samsung's hybrid Blu-ray HD DVD next-gen disk player for a while, but that doesn't mean it wasn't due an official European announcement.

Samsung has announced the launch of the BD-P1400, BD-P2400 and BD-UP5000, as well as the first Blu-ray Home Theatre system.

The BD-UP5000 Duo HD Player, priced at just £600 will be positioned as the flagship in the company’s growing line of high definition players and complete directly against the LG Super Multi Blue player launched earlier this year in the UK.

Offering the same playback capabilities as the BD-P2400 including HQV (Hollywood Quality Video) processing, the Samsung say the new BD-UP5000 supports both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats as well as their interactive technologies, BD Java and HDi.

The HT-BD2 Home Theater Solution with Blu-ray will come with HD 1080p support as well as offering a 7.1 channel HD receiver speaker system that supports Dolby TrueHD and the dts-HD Master Audio format.

The package will come with a fully powered subwoofer, four towers, a centre channel, and two satellite rear speakers giving the HT-BD2 a rumbling 1100 Watts of total output power.

The BD-P1400 and BD-P2400 Blu-ray players offer full compatibility with 24 movie frames per second playback, HDMI 1.3 output and Dolby Digital and DTS audio playback alongside Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD support. The BD-P1400 works with Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD.

Completing the package, the BD-P2400 that offer 1080i to 1080p HD upscaling.

The BD-P2400 and BD-P1400 models include backward compatibility with standard DVD and CD formats (including DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD and CD-R).