Need some help selecting a Blu-Ray Player....

Re: Need some help selecting a Blu-Ray Player....

Who said THAT?!

If you want to buy a Blu Ray player sometime in the next 90 days or so, the PS3 is really the only choice. As of last night, it is the only 2.0 profile machine on the market. There will be standalones with more features, but the only things a PS3 doesn't have are an IR remote (some would consider this a good thing, but not me), analog outs and bitstreaming audio.

Re: Need some help selecting a Blu-Ray Player....

FYI, you can add IR capability w/ something like this:

IR2BT - InfraRed to BlueTooth Converter for the PS3

It's a bit pricy, but sounds nice. For an inexpensive solution, you can also get the Bluwave(?) remote which provides an IR-to-USB dongle, but it doesn't provide power on/off function nor a few other useful ones. You can buy the latter from Amazon for ~$15 or so.

As for movie playback, other than that the PS3 does poorly on the Secrets' progressive scan DVD benchmark tests, it seems to be a wonderful player in general. Personally, like many others here, I'm a bit skeptical about the usefulness of the Secrets' results for the PS3 even though many of us used to depend heavily on them for this -- it really does seem like the test results don't match what we see/observe in actual practice in this particular case.

Well, as w/ any player though, there will always be certain things that don't quite suit certain people. For instance, the PS3 doesn't provide multi-channel analog audio output and cannot bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD/MA. It doesn't scale non-anamorphic DVDs (though it does provide 4x3 pillarboxing). It doesn't offer built-in IR remote capability though that can be addressed w/ 3rd party solutions. It doesn't provide its own front panel display, which might be important if/when you use it for audio only playback.

Of course, the PS3 does also come w/ more than its fair share of bonus features, etc. that other standalone players do not. Having built-in WiFi connectivity is nice for one, especially if you intend to make use of BD-Live (or even just for firmware/software updates). Along those lines, the PS3 also provides a rudimentary web browser that you might find useful on occasion. Some also use it to stream music, photos and videos from another computer -- and it can of course keep its own storage of such too...

_Man_

Re: Need some help selecting a Blu-Ray Player....

I had one but sold it and bought a BD30. The main reason was because I couldn't turn it on or off with my Harmony remote. Now with infrared to bluetooth adapters coming, I'm kicking myself for getting rid of it.

I thought Blu-ray playback looked outstanding on the PS3. DVD playback looked excellent as well, much better than my BD30 which does a terrible job with DVD's. The only two drawbacks for me were no infrared and no analog outs.

Re: Need some help selecting a Blu-Ray Player....

The PS3's load times are ridiculously fast. Example: Superbad took well over a full minute on my BDP-S300 to load up. On the PS3, it took about fifteen seconds.

Re: Need some help selecting a Blu-Ray Player....

I agree that the PS3 is a good choice for some people, but it's not the only choice. I went with the Panasonic DMP-BD30 for a number of reasons. I didn't have to buy an extra dongle in order to use my universal remote, and my receiver decodes all the new HD audio formats. Java 2.0 (and BD Live) isn't anything I care about. The BD30's picture quality is amazing and load times are very fast.

Re: Need some help selecting a Blu-Ray Player....

i'll 2nd the panny bd30, loads fast, very good picture