It never hurts to have another Blu-ray player on the market, especially come holiday shopping/bargain hunting time. We’re hoping Harman Kardon’s new Blu-ray player—the company’s first—will be available in the U.S. by then.

Harman will give Europe the first crack at the BDP 10 Blu-ray Disc player, which will be available this month and more at the premium end of Blu-ray standalone players with its 700 Euro price tag (that’s about $940 USD).

The good news is at least it’s BD-Live Profile 2.0 out of the gate, with onboard encoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

The bad news is you might need to upgrade your receiver if you want to enjoy those lossless audio formats, because as CrunchGear notes, despite the cost you don’t get multichannel analog outputs. Connectivity features include two-channel analog output, two digital (one coax, one optical) outs, and an HDMI output.

There’s also a front-panel USB port for flash and external USB hard drives, plus an Ethernet port, of course, for the latest downloadable material via BD-Live and firmware updates.

Video playback includes 1080/24 fps, and standard DVDs are upscaled to 1080p. You can also play MP3 and WMA (v8 and v9) compressed audio files, and pop in a flash drive of JPEG photos to view. There’s DivX video playback too.

About the Author:
Arlen Schweiger - Managing editor of Electronic House Magazine

Arlen contributes product news items to electronichouse.com along with his role on the print publication. Got a tip? Send it along!