Yamaha offers high-end Blu-ray Player
We’re headed into $200 Blu-ray players this holiday season, but the high-end market is still where a big portion of Blu-ray player sales are going. Marantz, Denon and Sony all have $1,000-plus Blu-ray players aimed at the upper echelon, and joining the party is Yamaha. The Yamaha BD-S2900 will retail at $1,199.
With this high-end product, you might expect by now that it is BD2.0, and you would be wrong. It is BD1.1, offering BonusView only. It features HDMI 1.3 for Deep Color, 1080p/24 and next-gen codec bitstream audio output (does not decode formats on board). They are touting the Deep Color feature the most, even though this is not part of the Blu-ray specification.
It is said the Yamaha includes an Ethernet port for internet connectivity, although looking to the back of the unit it does not appear to exist. Unfortunately it doesn’t have BD-Live features. It does have an SD card slot, so it’s possible they might add this feature in a future firmware upgrade like Sony’s BDP-S350 (if, in fact, the shipping unit has an Ethernet port).
This seems like a total failure in 2008. Maybe in 2006, but not today.
