Looking for a reason to supercharge the old A/V system with high-def Blu-ray Disc playback? Sony, in dropping the price of its new BDP-S300 player a full hundred bucks to $499, seems determined to give you one. The move makes the Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray Disc player one of the least expensive of its ilk on the market, along with the company's own PlayStation 3 game console. Question is, how does Sony's entry-level standalone model stack up in performance and features against the other contenders?
Let's take a look first at the S300's feature set. The main highlight here is 1080p/24 output — which lets the player extract progressive video, encoded at a film-friendly 24 frames per second on Blu-ray Discs, without intermediate conversion steps. (You'll need a TV capable of accepting a 1080p/24 signal and displaying it at a frame rate that's an integral multiple of 24 fps, such as 72 or 96 fps, to take full advantage of this.) And it can play back regular audio CDs, a feature that Sony's high-end $799 BDP-S1 bizarrely lacks. Another disc format that the player supports is recordable DVD loaded with AVCHD video. Several new high-def camcorders coming from Sony and other manufacturers record in this format, and the xvYCC-color-space (or "x.v.Color," in Sony parlance) recordings that they create can be played back directly on the S300 without having to first format and burn files to a new disc with a computer.
The all-black S300 has a solid look and feel, and its relatively spare front is marked by a set of basic control buttons and little else. I liked the top-mounted disc Open/Close button, which was easy to access with the player stowed on a low shelf beneath my TV. Player startup time clocked in at 45 seconds — pretty fast for a high-def disc player. And load times for most discs averaged a zippy 10 to 15 seconds. (Discs with numerous extras and interactive features took considerably longer to load.) The player's output connections include HDMI (1.2) and component-video, plus both optical and coaxial digital audio outputs and a 6-channel analog audio jack set — a potentially valuable feature if your receiver lacks HDMI switching. As it stands, the S300 doesn't provide onboard decoding for either Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks. It can decode Dolby Digital Plus soundtracks, however, and both these and the multichannel PCM soundtracks found on certain discs can be enjoyed via the player's HDMI or six-channel analog jacks.
Sony's remote control for the S300 doesn't have a backlit keypad, but the layout of buttons is clean — and the ones you'll use most often (such as the pop-up-menu and transport controls) are located in the center, where they can be easily found. One neat feature of the remote is its Video Format button, which lets you switch the player's output format with a few quick presses. Hitting the Display button lets you view a range of disc playback information, including current chapter and time as well as video data transfer rate. You can also extend the readout with video-display and audio-format information by pressing the related buttons after hitting Display.
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The Short Form
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| Price $499 / sonystyle.com / 877-865-7669 |
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Snapshot
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| Sony's basic player delivers the pleasures of Blu-ray at a relatively painless price. |
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Plus
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•Crisp, punchy picture with Blu-ray Discs •Low price for a Blu-ray player •Quick startup and disc-load times |
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Minus
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•No decoding options for lossless Dolby and DTS audio formats •Lacks Ethernet connectivity |
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Key Features
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•1080p high-def output •Upscales DVDs to 1080p via HDMI •1080p/24-fps True Cinema output option •Onboard Dolby Digital Plus decoding •AVCHD-format disc playback •Outputs: HDMI, component-, composite-, and S-video; coaxial and optical digital audio, 6-channel analog audio, and stereo analog audio •17 x 14.9 x 3.1 in; 9 lb |
Setup of the S300 in my system went down mostly smoothly, excepting a few hiccups that I'll address shortly. I connected it to an Anthem AVM 50 preamp/processor via HDMI and also ran a set of component-video cables to the TV to test the player's component-video performance.
The S300 provides an Easy Setup option to help you configure audio and video outputs for your system, or you can visit the Audio, Video, and Options menus one by one. First, I set the player for YCbCr (digital component) video output from its HDMI jack (two other options are for using an RGB display or a set with a DVI input). I made sure 24p output was switched off, since my current 1080p TV doesn't support it. I next switched the player's HDMI audio output option from Auto to PCM. This simplified setup by allowing my processor to receive Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Digital Plus, and 5.1-channel PCM soundtracks as a multichannel PCM streams via HDMI.
PERFORMANCE
Before I get into the player's video performance, let me first say that my original S300 sample was prone to occasional freeze-ups that required me to unplug and replug the machine to get it going again. And it didn't always play nice with the Anthem preamp: Sometimes an image appeared onscreen when I powered things up, and sometimes I had to restart both components several times to get to that point. These sorts of problems don't occur with the PS3 that I normally use for Blu-ray playback in my system, or with as a Samsung player that I also had on hand for testing. I requested a second sample, which didn't freeze up but proved even more reluctant to make the required HDMI handshake with my Anthem preamp. This sort of voodoo is a fairly common occurrence with HDMI hookups; when I connected the second S300 directly to the TV, a picture appeared with no problem at all.
When things did work smoothly, though, the player delivered fantastic picture quality from movies on Blu-ray Disc. In Letters from Iwo Jima, for example, details of the rough island landscape — with its deeply creviced hills and dark sandy beaches — really popped from the screen. And when watching a scene where Japanese troops practice target-shooting on a hillside, I was struck by the near-3D quality of the brushy vegetation surrounding the soldiers; the fine, thin branches extending from each bush looked distinct as opposed to blurring into a mass. Picture contrast from this and other reference-quality discs was also consistently punchy and satisfying with the S300. And colors showed a wide range of subtle hues, even in a film like Iwo Jima, which has a desaturated "period look" to it. The player's high-def performance from its component-video output was also very good, although the picture came across a bit softer than with HDMI.
The S300's upconversion of standard DVDs was fine, if a few notches below that of some other Blu-ray machines I've checked out. Overall, its performance with test DVDs was underwhelming, but no serious "jaggy" artifacts cropped up to mar the picture when I watched movies. Compared with the other high-def deck residing in my system, Toshiba's similarly priced HD-A20 HD DVD player, the DVDs I watched looked slightly soft and a bit noisier overall. But for the most part, I had no serious complaints about the Sony's performance here.
The player also proved to have decent baseline audio performance. In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, the pounding of tribal drums in a scene where Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is about to be roasted on a spit by cannibals had a full, resounding impact. And in a subsequent scene where Sparrow's shipmates flee from the tribe, the screams from both parties and the swirling, swashbuckling score combined to deliver a genuinely chaotic, over-the-top effect. But compared with Sony's BDP-S1 — which, compliments of a recent firmware update, can now internally decode both Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus soundtracks — the S300's audio features are somewhat limited. (At press time, no similar firmware update had been announced for the S300.)
BOTTOM LINE
Anyone looking to experience the formidable pleasures of watching movies on Blu-ray Disc, and at a reasonable startup cost, is advised to check out Sony's BDP-S300. But I'd shop around before making the jump. Sony's own PS3 console not only offers the same features at the same price, it adds both wireless and wired Ethernet connectivity for future interactive content as well as an HDMI 1.3 output — a feature that could enable you to pass lossless Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks in bitstream format to a compatible A/V receiver for decoding. And then there's Samsung's $599 BDP-1200, which provides a similar feature set to the S300's but tosses in standard-setting Silicon Optix HQV processing for DVD upconversion.
Whatever your decision, Blu-ray Disc playback is a mandatory upgrade for home theater enthusiasts, and the Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray Disc Player helps to make that upgrade a bit easier to swallow.
HD DVD/Blu-ray Center
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