Bluray players

[Blake_T]

was checking to see if anyone here was an expert on bluray players.

i had a little bit of extra tax return money to burn and i ended up picking up a sony bdp-bx1 (aka s350 w/ diff label) for $65 w/ box/manual/remote.

the guy also had a sony bdp-s301 (aka s300 w/ diff label) for sale for $60 w/ the remote. i was debating picking this one up too, but it's only a BD 1.1 player w/ no internet connection.

my question is to those out there, would that be worth grabbing or should i just be patient and wait for a newer used player in the same price range?

with most of my a/v gear i've learned over the years that older gen equipment is usually higher build quality (barring a significant design flaw) that performs better in various ways while being weaker in others. e.g. being better w/ sd upscaling and having a more solid piece of hardware in exchange for weaker BD playback/compatibility.

most of the time i've found that stuff w/ a new selling price > $300 will smoke the newer, consumer-friendly priced items on the market w/ new selling prices < $200. any comments?
i'm mainly concerned with how important bd live 2.0 will be etc.

i'm only now hitting the hdtv era so this hasn't been a concern of mine until recently.

[Blake_T]

i will add that i have 1000+ SD DVD's and i highly doubt i'm going to be replacing them all in the near future (if at all). i will probably pick and choose very carefully which movies i actually buy on bluray so this player will most likely be used for 90% SD content or more and upscaling is probably of greater importance.

at the same time i don't want to be cut off from future bluray releases because it lacks features.

i'm kind of eying that s301 vs. a used DVP-N75 that i found used for $35 the other day (older gen upscaling dvd player). i had picked up a DVP-710 and the upscaling on it was craptacular, loaded with interlacing glitches and jaggies. at the same time it's probably not worth dumping any more money into SD dvd players.

[JR]

Playstation 3 has been better in image quality than any dedicated players in tests. Check it out for yourself.

[Blake_T]

i have an original 60gb PS3 that i refuse to play movies on because of the YLOD issues that have shown up with extended use. it's basically a dedicated gaming machine for me as i don't want it to burn out anytime soon.

[Star Shark]

Older machines have better build quality but the format is still sort of finalizing itself. This same stuff happened with DVD. For the first couple years many players had difficulty playing the Matrix in White Rabbit Mode. I've heard there's roughly a 2 minute load time for Avatar Bluray so I might just wait for the faster processors to be put in players.

[Blake_T]

yah. i used to try to nip the last-gen made in japan stuff, often in the used market.
now only the obscenely expensive stuff tends to get made in japan and it seems to stay really expensive even used (if it even exists at all).

i guess i'm still up in the air.

the newer S360 players are popping up used in the $80ish range, but i know their build quality is significantly lower than the older players although their format support and some of the use features are better. it's often a trade off of internet and 2.0 vs. high end audio codecs, better build quality, etc.

i've learned my lesson though and i'm going the cheapass route on all of it. once it's actually set up i don't really care about how "high end" it is assuming that it doesn't perform like crap. with that in mind, i'm looking at the $50-80 range

[Blake_T]

hrm, i've kind of decided to avoid anything that doesn't have internet or usb firmware update capabilities.

also for a case against the PS3, i watch a ton of SD content still and a lot of stuff with subtitles. PS3's are pretty weak in their SD upconversion and they also don't adjust the subtitles to the proper placement like an HDMI dvd player will.

now that i have a week's use with the BD player i like it's upscaling but get a bit frustrated with its poor pause/frame/slow functionality. another issue i am having so far is how long it takes to load some bluray movies and forced reloading with no resume if i ever stop the movie on newer blurays.

[Fasteddy411]

Without going into to much detail, i worked for a compression and authoring facility that did Blu-ray compatibility, and tested various studios discs on just about every brand of player from profile 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0.

If you want to actually be able to watch every movie you buy/rent, the PS3 is the way to go. I also liked the Sony stand alone players S350/S360, or even the S550's. If i recall they all use the pretty much the same chipset.

If you can bare the loading times Panasonic also makes a quality stand alone player, the BD50/BD60/BD80 are all comparable.

The LG players were OK, but had trouble with some studios titles and would often crash randomly.

Though if you'd like to Spend $500 you could buy an Oppo BD83. They were quality as well.

If you'd like to never watch a Blu-ray movie you can get a Samsung player, all of their models were equally shitty.

To answer you 2.0 BD-live question, i never saw anything come through our place from any studio that interested me in the least related to BD-Live.

Also be aware that a 1.0 player will not play most of the interactive features of a disc. (for example discs that have a PIP stream)

In buying a player, you can be concerned with build quality and SD up-scaling, but to be honest some players will play every Blu-ray disc out there, and some of them just won't play certain studios titles.

[Blake_T]

thanks for the info.

my BX1 (S350) is doing pretty well so far. i've been quite pleased with the SD-upscaling but i'm getting a bit frustrated at not being able to pause and slow-mo or frame advance or fastforward/rewind through frames.

the bd-live question was more of a question in terms of if 1.0/1.1 players would be able to play the main features of the newer bluray discs in the future. considering that you can get a used 2.0, 1.1, or 1.0 player for about the same price used, i'll probably just wait a while.

i've actually started investigating the various generations of upscaling dvd players more since i often need the frame by frame abilities.

[Fasteddy411]

Not trying to be a dick, but why exactly are you so concerned with being able to frame by frame SD DVD's?

[some call me...tim?]

Bewbs.

[Blake_T]

Not trying to be a dick, but why exactly are you so concerned with being able to frame by frame SD DVD's?

don't forget that i'm a disc golf instructor. as much as i speak out against being overly reliant on videos for disc golf instruction, i use them fairly regularly with students who become friends or friends who become students. videos can help a lot IF PEOPLE KNOW WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE LOOKING FOR (sorry for the all caps, but man, i've had to justify that so much).

i also spent thousands of hours re-watching disc golf videos in order to help try and gather useful stuff from form analysis.

bewbs too.


i actually found a NOS sony DVP-NS90V at ultimate electronics today on clearance for $55. it was a bit more than i was hoping to spend but i figured it would be worth a shot. before i opened it i did some reading and found a lot of potential hardware breakdown issues and some issues pertaining to a black bar showing up during upscaling... oddly enough i found two sets of reviews from real review sites and it seems that most are from 2005-06 but there was all of a sudden a resurgence of them again in 2010.

i hooked it up and figured if black bars showed up on top and bottom i would return it but it turned out fine and the 720p upscaling does a lot better with the scaling on my bravia than the newer 1080 SD player upscalers. no interlacing glitches or weird jaggies so far. i'm hoping this one doesn't crap out early though, many described hardware failure 13 months after purchasing.

[Torg]

Looks like I got here a little late, but I researched this about 7 months ago and didn't want to use the game machine for the same reason. I went with a LG390. Load times were pretty important for me as well as not needing to buy dongles. With the last firmware update I received about a week ago, the load time is almost gone. It is actually kind of amazing how fast it is compared to other players. The wireless connection is pretty good, but I wish I could force it to stream at whatever quality I want. I never use the Cinema Now, but I use the netflix streaming and youtube all the time. Works great other than its youtube search abilities (you pretty much have to know the name of the video).