Toshiba's BDX2000 Blu-ray player. (Click to enlarge)
[PHOTO: Courtesy of Toshiba]

If you can't beat 'em, join them. That's finally Toshiba's message as the company readies to roll out its first Blu-ray player, the BDX2000, this fall. The player will arrive in November, at a price of $250.

The BDX200 is a BD-Live-ready player (you have to add 1GB of flash memory for the BD-Live Internet feature to work), and it includes an SD card slot for playing digital music, photos and video--including high-def AVCHD files—on your TV.

The player has a "smoked mirrored" front panel, with a drop-down door that conceals the primary controls. When used with a Toshiba Regza TV, the player and TV can both be controlled from a single remote. From the announcement, it's unclear whether the layer internally decodes the high-resolution lossless audio formats—Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-Master Audio—internally, or sends it out via bitstream for decoding in a receiver. [Note: We just learned the player decodes these formats internally.] —James K. Willcox