You might want to hold off on buying the Funai Blu-ray player from my last post. The Samsung BD-P1500, expected in June, is showing up in Wal*Mart with a $348 price tag – the expected MSRP was $399. That’s just $50 more than the Funai/Magnavox deck, and the Samsung is ‘BD-Live Ready’. That means it will ship with Profile 1.1, aka ‘Bonus View’, support but it has the hardware (such as a Ethernet port) required for Profile 2.0/BD-Live, and support will be enabled via a firmware update later this year. The firmware update will also add DTS-HD audio support.
While a sub-$300 price tag is nice, for $50 I’d definitely opt for the Samsung.
Via EngadgetHD.