Home Theater Blog reviews Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray player
Home Theater Blog has a solid review of the new Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray player here on their website. The BDP-S300 is Sony’s cheapest Blu-ray player selling for an MSRP of $499. Home Theater Blog does an excellent overview of the capabilities of the device as well as picture performance - especially in comparison to the PS3’s Blu-ray performance. One of the unfortunate missing capabilities from the player is the lack of a network connection but really - shouldn’t this be a mandatory feature on all players? Can it really jack up the cost of a Blu-ray player that much? I doubt it.
Specs for the Sony BDP-S300 include the following:
- BD-ROM, DVD Video, DVD+R/+RW/DVD-R/-RW, CD playback
- AVC-HD media playback with x.v.Color output
- Supports MPEG2/MPEG4-AVC/VC-1
- Full HD 1080/60p and 24p True Cinema Video Output
- DVD upscaling to 1080p via HDMI
- Support for BRAVIA Theater Sync
- Cinema Tuned Picture Presets
- Support for Uncompressed Multi-Channel Linear PCM output, Dolby Digital Plus decoding, Dolby Digital and dts 5.1 channel output
- BD-Java interactive capability
- Screen saver
- MP3 and JPEG playback from DVD+R/+RW, DVD-R/-RW
- Measures 17 x 3 1/8 x 14 7/8 inches and weighs 10 lbs
In any event, here’s the current recommendation from Home Theater Blog on the BDP-S300:
At this point if you’re looking for a stand-alone Blu-ray player I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the BDP-S300 quite as easily as before these issues came to light. It’s still a good player, but certainly not quite as good as our first impressions indicated.
If you’re interested in reading the instruction manual, check out the PDF link here at SonyStyle’s website.