Mathew Cohen from Blue Ridge has sent in review of Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray player.

October 29, 2008

The trend for high-definition disc players is glossy black and this player is no exception. The front faceplate is mirror-reflective and black with a rather small LED display in the center of the unit and a blue LED-lit circle just to the right. The disc tray is positioned in the far upper right of the player. There are only two front panel controls--a power button on the left and a disc open/close button on the right--so you're out of luck if the remote goes missing. Pressing the "Setup" button on the remote brings up a bunch of awkward icons . But despite lacking some visual pizazz there weren't any issues navigating the options.

The included remote is pretty good. Most of the standard playback controls glow in dark. There's a directional pad toward the bottom of the remote and handy buttons located around the perimeter. A little more button differentiation would have been nice.

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 set up was easy as well. I just plugged it in and attached a hi-speed HDMI cable to my 1080p lcd televsion and after a fast set up menu it was ready to go. I don't have separate speakers so I did not have to set up other audio wires. Another great feature is you can set this up directly to your computer for upgrades. They could not have made this any better compared to what has been available on the market to this date.

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