New Samsung BD-P2550 Blu-ray Unveiled at Best Buy

Best Buy seems to be promoting a new Blu-ray player for Samsung. Perhaps the retailer has some special insights into Samsung’s product line. Without the usual advance warning from the manufacturer a new Samsung BD player has suddenly appeared on Best Buy’s website.

It’s the model P2550 and retails at Best Buy for $499, putting it up there with premium Blu-ray players. But this one appears to deliver the goods, which makes it all the more strange that Samsung itself wouldn’t herald its arrival.

Samsung’s new Blu-ray disc player has a lot of the features that have been annoyingly elusive to find in a single player, including Sammy’s own BD-P1500. The new unit has 7.1 analog outputs and the mightily prized Silicon Optix HQV processing for upconverting those standard-def DVDs. Two significant features you won’t find in Samsung’s BD-P1500.

The Product Description says nothing about support for BD-Live, in fact the User Manual has this to say:

This Samsung Blu-ray Disc Player (BD-P2500/BD-P2550) supports only the BD-ROM Profile 1 version 1.1 specification.

The unit does have an Ethernet port which Samsung uses to connect to its servers for firmware updates. Maybe the folks that write Best Buy Product Descriptions purposely leave out important details to keep us guessing. The Product Features list also outlines Dolby high-res audio codecs the unit is capable of decoding, mentioning nothing of DTS. But under the Specifications list, DTS Decoder gets a big Yes.

UPDATE: Click here to download the Samsung BD-P2550 User Manual

The unit cannot play DVD+R/RW, DVD-RAM, CDI, or CDV discs. It also cannot play CD-R/RW and DVD-R/RW with recorded content such as divx, avi, mpg, mov, wma, mp3, and digital photo view (JPEG) files.

If you’re spending $500 on a Blu-ray player these days the complete format at profile 2.0 including BD-Live should be a high priority. EngadgetHD speculates that BD-Live could be added later. After all, the unit is packing an Ethernet port that allows firmware updates.