Sony announced a pair of new Blu-ray players today with advanced interactive features. The new Sony BDP-S350 and the BDP-S550 players both support the BonusView picture-in-picture feature on some of the new Blu-ray discs.

The S350 is BD-Live ready and has an Ethernet port for firmware updates providing Internet content access. The S550 ships ready for both these advanced features and includes 1GB of storage that connects to a storage port on the back of the player. "Building on the exceptional picture and sound quality of previous players, Sony's next-generation Blu-ray Disc models bring exciting interactive features to life and offer consumers a ground-breaking experience," said Chris Fawcett, vice president of marketing for Sony Electronics' Home Product Division. "These new devices bring home movie experience beyond the cinema and into a whole new realm of entertainment."

Both players will provide 7.1 Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus decoding and bit-stream output. The S550 adds dts-HD High Resolution Audio and dts-HD Master Audio. Both support AVCHD discs as well. The S350 will ship this fall for around $400 and the S550 ships this fall for $500.

Via Sony