Best Buy is offering an Insignia Blu-ray player priced at US$349.99 and a $100 Coupon Book, but there are several catches.

The Blu-ray player, Insignia model NS-BRDVD, which is Best Buy’s house brand (from Japan’s Funai), features 1080p output, including DVD upconverting to 1080p, and some advanced sound outputs like Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD, but the lossless Dolby TrueHD is 2 channel only.

Other features include backward compatibility with DVD, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD and CD-R/RW discs and the unit is compatible with MP3, WMA and JPEG formats. Outputs include one stereo audio, one composite video, one component video, one digital optical audio, one digital coaxial audio and one HDMI.

iPO spoke with a Best Buy customer service representative who, after considerable investigation, could not say what the contents of the coupon book are, but it’s not a store credit. Multiple coupons can be used for the purchase of Blu-ray movies from Disney, Touchstone, and Miramax. It’s possible that the coupon book could have, for example, US$5 off on 20 Blu-ray movies or something similar, so unlike a store credit, the customer may or may not be able to reasonably exploit the full $100 savings.

The player does not support BD-Live, that is, BD 1.1 protocol that allows interactive features, according to TVPredictions.com

iPO has published a buyer’s guide that answers a lot of questions the newbie to HDTV and Blu-ray may have.