This morning we got our first up close and personal look at Denons' upcoming Blu-ray Disc players- the DVD-3800BDCI ($1,999 December) and the DVD-2500BTCI ($1,199 December). And a chance to ask Denon's Jeff Talmadge (pictured above) more about the interactivity platforms of the players, and more.

On interactivity, here's the straight dope. Both players are going to be BD-ROM Profile 1.1, which means the players will provide secondary audio/video decoders and the local storage for streaming Picture-In-Picture features. However, while the players include and SD Card slot that would expand the local storage to meet Profile 2 ("BD Live") specs, the players do not includes an Ethernet port or Wi-Fi connectivity. Denon is still ahead of the vast majorioty of standalone BD players on the market, but when BD Live shows up next year, no dice.

Denon assured us that this player boasts a lot of processing power and indeed includes the ability to decode full resolution DTS-HD Master Audio lossless and Dolby TrueHD, both of which can also be transmitted as native bitstreams over the players' HDMI 1.3 outputs. In addition, both players can transcode DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD lossless to PCM and pass that over the HDMI outs.

The DVD-2500BTCI is transport only, and does not include analog outputs of any form, only an HDMI 1.3 output. Further distinguishing the DVD-3800BTCI is the inclusion of the Silicon Optix REALTA HQV processing chip.