If you’ve been waiting for prices to come down on Blu-ray, you might want to check out the Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray player. It’s a solid performer for a less-expensive model and comes from the company behind the BRD specification. If you’re still unsure, check out Ben Drawbaugh’s EngadgetHD review. And don’t forget that Sony’s been upgrading the firmware to keep it up to date – details found in the first review listed on Amazon.
Check out more of Brent’s reflections on tech, gadgets, software and media at Brent Evans Geek Tonic.
We have a few of these at work for Blu-ray testing (we do authoring) and they are SLOW. Other than that, it seems like a great player but I think I’m saving up for a PS3. If you have to have a Blu-ray player for cheap though, it’s not a bad price.
Rey,
I’m curious if you’ve upgraded any of those players firmware since you’ve used them at work. I hear the firmware upgrades speeds up the loading some.
I’d think they should have a player for each firmware revision. Or is that not how compatibility testing works?
Brent,
We did update the firmware on the 2 we have a couple weeks ago to 4.2, but I didn’t notice a speed difference. I didn’t time it or anything so it may have but I can’t say for sure. We have 2 S300, 2 PS3s, some Pioneer Elite(?) and a Panasonic player of some sort and a Sharp player that can’t play any burned media, not sure about model numbers. For real serious testing we send stuff out to a third party who does firmware testing and all that, we just do an initial testing in-house.
The BDP-S300 is only Profile 1.0, so even sub-$200 I think I’d give it a pass. Right now Amazon has a sale where you can buy a BD player and three Warner BD movies and save an extra $50. The BDP-S300 is one of the players, but the one I’d pick is the Samsung BD-P1500 for $279.99 – for an extra $80 it is Profile 2.0 / BD-Live.