Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray player reviewed by Zdenka Smith

July 3, 2008

Design:

This player's design is pure understatement. The simple rectangular component sports a LED display on the bottom half of its face. In the upper right section there are some basic playback controls. On the top of the player are two critical buttons--open/close and power--which can be somewhat irksome if you're planning to stack components.

Remote Control:

The included clicker is fairly standard. There's a centrally located directional pad with playback controls located nearby. Our biggest complaint concerns the lack of button differentiation--especially with the playback controls--which makes it a bit hard to use by feel. Better universal remote is recommended.

Features:

This player can play standard- definition DVDs and CDs as well as Blu-ray. This player was released before the deadline and it only conforms to the older Profile 1.0. This player won't be able to play some picture-in-picture commentary tracks on newer discs. This won't be a deal breaker for everyone since many people barely have enough time to watch a full movie. It has onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus. It lacks bit-stream audio support for high resolution formats which means you can't send encoded Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks to new receivers with decoding capabilities. This player's connectivity package is solid. The main connection is the HDMI output which is capable of outputting 1080p video at 24 frames per second. High-definition video can also be output over the component video outputs (limited to 1080i).

Performance:

We started off our test looking at Corpse Bride in 1080p on this player. This disc is extremely sharp and any difference in detail between the players should be visible. We found it very difficult to find any significant differences in the image quality between the players. This is even more so the case when watching at a standard viewing distance of around 8 feet for a 50-inch plasma. We took a look at some test patterns on Silicon Image's HQV test suite on Blu-ray in 1080p mode on both players. Like we said before there's really very little difference in Blu-ray performance among all Blu-ray players.

Rating: