NEWS: Panasonic's Blu-ray flagship due in June

Panasonic has announced European pricing and availability for its flagship DMP-BD50E Blu-ray Disc player, which conforms to profile 2.0 and offers bitstream output from HD audio formats.

It announced at the Munich High End Show, which opened this morning, that the player will go into the shops in June, and sell for 599 euros – currently about £500.

The player offers full compatibility with BD-Live functionality, and has 1080p/24fps, DeepColour and x.v.Colour output from DVD and upscaling to 1080p for DVDs.

It has an onboard decoder for all HD Audio formats, plus that bitstream output capability, and can also play all DVD formats, CD/CD-R/RW, JPEGs and DiVX files.

There's also an SDHD card slot for the playback of pictures and other media files.

Andrew has written about audio and video products for the past 20+ years, and been a consumer journalist for more than 30 years, starting his career on camera magazines. Andrew has contributed to titles including What Hi-Fi?, GramophoneJazzwise and Hi-Fi CriticHi-Fi News & Record Review and Hi-Fi Choice. I’ve also written for a number of non-specialist and overseas magazines.