Onkyo's PR man has just dropped off a review sample of Onkyo's new DV-BD606 Blu-ray player, expected to go on sale shortly for £400 – £200 less than Denon's recently unveiled DVD-1800BD.
A quick glance inside the box and at the spec sheet tells us it will upconvert SD video to 1080p, play CD, BD-Video, BD-R, BD-RE and DVD-Video disc, supports 1080p/24fps video and will pass Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio bitstream audio via HDMI to a compatible AV receiver.
It comes with Bonus View for picture-in-picture audio and video, supports Deep Colour, uses 192kHz/24-bit audio DACs, has one optical and one coaxial digital output, a component video out and HDMI 1.3a connectivity.
The player also has a memory card slot, on-screen display and is Profile 1.1 out of the box. Additional content can be stored on SD cards, using an internet-enabled computer, and then played back when inserted in the fascia mounted slot.
But it has no multichannel analogue outputs for connecting to older (non-HDMI) AV receivers.
However, for AV receivers without HD audio decoding, 7.1 channel audio can also be decoded internally and delivered as a PCM signal over the HDMI connection.
And if you want to spruce up the picture quality of your existing DVD collection, MPEG and 3D noise reduction can be selected via the on-screen display.
We'll be reviewing the Onkyo DV-BD606 in the January 2009 issue of What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision, on sale from December 11th. And if the powers-that-be agree, we may even be able to bring you the review online a little before then.