Sony officially announced the player today, but it won't be shipping until July? Looks to me like Sony is taking a page from the Apple MacBook Pro and its infamous roller-coaster ride of ship dates.

The BD player looks pretty enormous for a set top player, but that wasn't a surprise given what I saw at CES. All the HD players were pretty enormous. The player outputs 1920x1080p(no surprise there). The good news is that standard DVDs are compatible with the added feature of 1080p upscaling through HDMI, which gives new life to existing DVD libraries.

This BD-ROM/R/RE player supports DVD playback from DVD/DVD+/-R / +/-RW encoded discs, as well as MP3 audio files and JPEG images stored on DVD+/-R / +/-RW discs, according to Sony. The player will retail for a $1000.

If that wasn't enough, Sony also announced that it'll be shipping a Sony VAIO RC Desktop equipped with a Blu Ray drive. The PC will come with, hold your breath, one piece of 25GB rewritable Blu Ray media. Given the price of these blanks, I think I'll keep that in my empty trophy case.