Bob Doyle from Nebraska has sent in review of Sony BDP-S5000 Blu-ray player.

August 31, 2008

This player is smaller than the previous model. It's about half as deep as every other Blu-ray players. Coming in at 17 inches wide by 8.75 inches deep by 2.38 inches high.On the far right are a couple playback controls accompanied by LCD screen. There is also a single blue indicator light which tells you if the player is outputting at 24 frames per second.

The player's included remote control has a decent button layout although there are some missteps. The remote has a centrally located directional pad surrounded by useful buttons such as Back and Pop-up Menu. The separate rocker buttons for volume and channel control--for those who want to control their TV. The placement of the playback controls is subpar with fast-forward and rewind buttons located far away from central buttons.

This player is currently a Profile 1.1 Blu-ray player which means it can access picture-in-picture commentary tracks available on some Blu-ray Discs. It is not a Profile 2.0 player so it cannot access the BD-Live features on certain new Blu-ray Discs. This player can be upgraded in future to be compatible with profile 2.0. This player can output both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio in bit stream format which means that people with newer receivers with onboard decoding can still take advantage of DTS-HD Master Audio. The similarly priced Sony PlayStation 3 can decode both formats which means you only need a receiver with HDMI support to take advantage of both formats.

The Largest negatives are the decoding of DTS MA and Dolbey True HD. DTS MA is currently not supported but it is possible it could happen in a future update. On the Dolby True HD side the negative here is that it can only decode it to 2 channel internally. Now if you have a reciever that can decode the bitstreamed audio then none of this really affects you because the receiver fills in the blanks.

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