New Blu-ray player Sony BDP-S301 reviewed by Tim Tatum

November 21, 2008

I bought a Sony BDP-S301, and PS3. In the 1 week that I've had this player, it's done a marvelous job on video and audio quality. I'm running it on a 55" Samsung connected through HDMI. I've never had any of the stutters or other audio/video glitches that others have mentioned. I went with this player due to positive reviews and how I feel about the the brand. The BR players are all updatable so it's possible to play the latest movies. However, this player has a VERY difficult failure mode and upgrade procedure. But once you get that 1080p flat screen there's just no other way to watch video. Even with the problem it is worth getting this player for 1080p picures.

I have only had significant problems with one disk that I own and that was "Lord of War". It played the first 3/4 of the movie just fine and then started freezing up every 1-2 minutes making the movie unwatchable. For those who wonder if it will play homemade Blu-Ray DVDs I can report that I have sucessfully created a Blu-Ray DVD with menus on a 25G Single Layer BD-RE (Rewritable) disk using the LG GGW-H20L burner. Other firmware updatres are available but I haven't needed them yet. This player is good as far as disks that work on it but it does not support 48kHz/24-bit HD true sound that few blu-ray disks come with. The sound will pop out of sync with the visual. Before you buy call the manufacturer and ask if they have solved this problem by issuing a firmware (disk to put in the machine to update the harddrive) or not.

Upconversion on this player is pretty good, which is very important if you have large library of DVDs. I figured instead of spending $100 or so on upconvert DVD player to work with my new TV, I decided to go directly to Blu-Ray, since the Blu-Ray is now standard of HD DVDs. The Upconversion of standard definition DVDs is defnitely a strong point for this player. Overall, I found this player to be competent Blu-ray player and a great upconverting DVD player.

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