BluRay is still an emerging technology, so of course we will have to pay a premium if we want to partake of the bleeding edge players released for it. But are the prices too high? Many thought it was ridiculous when Samsung released the BD-P1000 for nearly a thousand dollars, which was outrageous. Now it's even more outrageous, as Panasonic plans to release the DMP-BD10 with an incredible $1300 price tag. The player does look quite nice on paper:
The DMP-BD10 features a 296MHz, 14-bit video D/A converter which supports 4x oversampling on 1080i/720p output. It is of course backwards compatible with current DVDs and CDs and it also upconverts regular DVDs to 1080P via HDMI.
Panasonic offers full solutions for Blu-ray, with speaker and receiver packages to couple with the BD10, but be prepared to spend an incredible amount of money for it. It's probably a good idea to wait a while yet before sampling the new optical technologies. $1300 just seems too far out there.