Sony’s BDP-S350 will support BD-Live after an upgrade, which will be available later this year.

Sony Starts Selling BD-Live-Ready Player

The BDP-S350 promises all of Blu-ray's new features, for $400.

Smack dab in the middle of the summer, and Sony has delivered on their promise—the promise of delivering the BDP-S350 by summer. The company just announced that it’s shipping now.

The new unit supports BonusView, which is on some of the newer Blu-ray movie releases. It also is BD-Live-ready, which means you’ll need to upgrade it later this year to get full-blown BD-Live features.

Sony says that the unit is 55 percent smaller, has a faster boot time ("approximately a few seconds"), and a port for optional external storage. Of course, it will also upconvert your old standard-def DVDs to a cool 1080p—via HDMI. One other handy feature is the Precision Drive HD, which can stabilize playback of all of those discs the kids have been using for afternoon Frisbee.

Finally, they’ve also got the green aspect in there, promising 21 percent less power consumption during playback and 43 percent less in standy-by. Other features include 7.1 channel Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus decoding and bit-stream output, as well as DTS-HD High Resolution Audio and Master Audio bit-stream output.

Sony’s BDP-S350 is available now at authorized retailers, as well as Sony Style stores, for $400.

Click here to read entire press release.