While Blu-ray players have breached the $200 mark late last year with a Sylvania player for $159.99 in December, none of them offer any support for BD-Live, a feature which is mainly limited to higher end pricey Profile 2.0 players. Now according to c|net, CompUSA has started selling refurbished BD-Live ready Samsung BD-P1500 Blu-ray disc players for just $169.99, not much more than the Sylvania price.
Besides the players being refurbished, one catch however is that Samsung has yet to release a firmware update to provide the BD-Live support. It may take a few months for them to release a firmware update to bring the player to Profile 2.0. Samsung also plans providing DTS-HD Master Audio decoding in a firmware update.
In the meantime, the player provides several key features such as HDMI 1.3 and Dolby TrueHD audio decoding. The player has received a good c|net review rating as well as 4/5 average user ratings on c|net and Amazon.
The refurbished player comes with a 90 day warranty and delivery is priced at $5 within the US. According to PriceGrabber, this player starts at $229.99 new, so it will likely not be long before new BD-Live players breach the $200 mark also.
