Toshiba grits its teeth, releases Blu-ray player

Toshiba officially conceded the format war

in February 2008, but plenty of people thought it wasn't really over until Toshiba put out a Blu-ray player. A year and a half later, that day has finally come. This morning, Toshiba announced the BDX2000, an entry-level Blu-ray player ($250 list price) to be released in November.

While we're always glad to see more competition in the Blu-ray space, the BDX2000 doesn't bring anything special to the table. It supports all the basic features, like Profile 2.0 compatibility and onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio, but there are currently no premium features, such as integrated Wi-Fi or streaming media services like Netflix. There's also no onboard memory, so you'll need to add storage using the player's SD card slot to use BD-Live features.

Considering its midrange price, the BDX2000 will have a tough time competing against players like the Panasonic DMP-BD60, Samsung BD-P1600, and LG BD370, all of which offer streaming content in addition to Blu-ray playback.