$599 BLU-RAY BDP-S300 PLAYER DUE SOON FROM SONY!

Sony plans to release the BDP-S300 Blu-ray player with a suggested price of $599, that's almost half the price of the current $999 BDP-S1 Blu-ray player. Sony claims that it will have the same capabilities of the current player but will be more compact to resemble current DVD players.

Features include DVD upconversion up to 1080p and 24 frames per second output on Blu-ray discs, support for standard audio CDs, decoding of Dolby Digital Plus (although no support for Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD-Master format),and support for the xvYCC color space which suggests HDMI 1.3, but has not been confirmed as yet.

Expected ship date is around the end of the 3rd quarter 2007. In additon, the company claims that by year end they expect their Blu-Ray player to drop even more to the $299-$399 price range in a move to drive sales up and HD-DVD out.

Update: The $299-$399 Blu-Ray player pricing towared the end of the year was a misquote from the Sony rep "Stan Glasgow." Apparently what he meant was that the "$299 price would be the tipping point where the average consumer would start to consider buying a Blu-ray player."