The Sony BDP-S offers excellent image quality and a solid feature set, but only consider it if you need the multichannel analog outputs. As with all first-generation technologies, this one will cost you, and its capabilities are just the tip of the format's iceberg. That said, it's still worth a peek. The Sony BDP-S will play your Blu-rays just fine but it doesn't do enough to embrace streaming media like its competitors.
The Sony BDP-S is a very smart Blu-ray player that sells for a very good price, thanks primarily to eliminating such features as 3D support. There is no compelling reason to buy this player over a PlayStation 3: it's too expensive, doesn't support profile 1. The picture and sound quality are, however, excellent, which makes it a good player with a silly price tag.
Features Though many Blu-ray players, including this Sony, support 3D playback, it's no longer a major marketing point. Instead, Sony is highlighting the player's networking capabilities with a feature it calls "Super Wi-Fi," which supposedly offers a "stronger, faster wireless connection.
The video-streaming services on offer here are quite broad, with Netflix, Amazon Instant, Hulu Plus and Vudu all accounted for. In the past year, the number of processors in a home theater gadget has become important for marketers, and if you're one of the few people taking notice, the BDP-S has a dual-core processor. While this will probably have little effect on playback, you may expect faster loading times for discs and streaming services, plus faster animations in the operating system.
If you're still in possession of a CRT television or a flat-screen older than six years then a Blu-ray player is not for you. Most players have now jettisoned analog outputs, opting for digital-only ports.
The player has an onboard browser that is controlled via the remote yech! Sadly, the browser doesn't support Flash. Performance For the last few years even the cheapest Blu-ray players have had high-level playback capability and there has been little to separate many of them. The Sony performs similarly to its competitors in both synthetic and real-world tests.
Only in the film tests in our synthetic HQV test suite did it suffer from any aberrations. The test consists of a slow pan past a football stadium and in both the and pull-down sections the Sony exhibited more moire than the Panasonic DMP-BDT , and a little bit of judder in the pull-down test. While there was some processing happening neither test could be considered smooth, so it had to be marked as a fail.
While the Panasonic did have a strange problem with one of the Chroma patterns in which it initially failed but on restart it worked, the Sony passed the first time.
In real terms this means the Sony is unlikely to exhibit combing on red colors during playback, but this is more a problem for analog connections -- something this player doesn't have anyway. But those minor failures on synthetic tests just didn't show up much when we looked at actual program material.
There were also bugs: playing the "relaxing" puzzle game Flower quickly became jarring due to loud audio pops and pixilation. Text input lag was even worse than with Netflix, taking six seconds between pressing a letter and it appearing onscreen. Games also took a very long time to load: from Galaga to Uncharted 3, most games took between 2 and 4 minutes to access the loading screen.
The Sony is a capable performer for the price. It passed all of our synthetic and real-world image tests in both Blu-ray and DVD.
As far as playback speed, the Sony wasn't especially quick, taking While this beats the competitive LG BP by more than a few seconds, if you want more speed can it's worth spending the extra twenty bucks on the quicker Samsung J Sony is one of the only brands that has bothered refreshing its line of Blu-ray players for , but given that the models are still good, it's hard to see Sony making the same effort next year.
It's speed that now separates them.
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