Do you go Blu-ray or HD DVD? Perhaps you just want to throw your arms up and take ‘em both? One option you’ll be able to do that with coming soon is the BD-UP5000 Duo HD Player from Samsung.

After showing up on the radar back in the spring, Samsung today revealed some of the specifics of its first dual-format HD optical disc player.

One of the trendy items is support for the formats’ interactivity technologies (HDi and BD-Java), which up the ante on the traditional type of extras that come with your standard DVDs these days. The HD DVD camp certainly touts its use of an Ethernet port for such goodies, and the Duo HD Player includes one.

Here are some other technical goodies:

• Blu-ray playback at content native HD resolution of 1080p/1080i/720p and 1080p 24Fs/ 60Fs
• HD DVD playback at 1080p/1080i/720p
• HQV (Hollywood Quality Video) video selectable up-conversion processing 720p/1080i/1080p
• Stereo and 7.1-channel audio outputs
• Coaxial and optical digital audio outputs
• Dolby Digital Plus, DTS HD, MP3 audio decoding, Dolby TrueHD
• HD DVD/BD-ROM/ DVD-ROM, DVD-+/R, DVD-+/RW, CD, CD-R and CD-RW
• HDMI 1.3 digital interface (1080p/1080i/720p)
• MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, HD JPEG decoding
• 12-bit/216 MhZ video D/A converter; 24-bit/192KHz audio D/A converter
• HDMI, Component Video, S-Video and Composite video outputs
• HDMI CEC
• Local Storage
• Picture-in-picture

The BD-UP5000 is due out in Q4 of this year with an MSRP of $1,049.  Go to www.samsung.com for more.

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!