JVC Announce Budget XV-BP11 Blu-ray Player

 
New from JVC is the XV-BP11, a relatively ordinary Blu-ray player apart from its very competitive retail price of $199, which could translate into a very reasonable cost when you find it on the shelves.  We like the slim form factor of the player too - gone are the days of monstrous players that don't fit in our stands - and we like the front-mounted USB port.  The JVC deck will play Blu-ray, DVD and all its recordable brethren, plus it will decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD audio.  Rushing out to get one?  Hold your horses, friend.

Now, we expect a budget player to have some features removed or to have corners cut in order to keep the low price, but JVC have made the XV-BP11 a Profile 1.1 machine.  What's that?  You've forgotten what Profile 1.1 is as it's so last year?  To refresh your memory, Profile 1.1 means no internet connection therefore no BD-Live and no option for future streaming video firmware additions.  Whereas BD-Live is hardly an essential right now, there are some cool Internet-based extras to be found on certain discs - the Transformers re-issue for example - and who knows what it will be like in six months time.

For this reason, we can only see the XV-BP11 finding a home as a second player, or to those who couldn't care less about bonus content and simply want to enjoy high definition movies.  If that's you, then you'll find it difficult to ignore the price.