need a new Blu ray player (1 Viewer)

[chetc]

My CD player in the basement is 10yrs old and bit the dust jumping sectors and tracks, so I want to take my Pioneer DVD player that I have upstairs it plays cd's also, so I would think it would be better just to put the Pioneer player in the basement, so this leaves me with replacing the DVD player upstairs, IS it best for me to get a Blu Ray dvd player now, even though I don't have any Blu Ray disc or a HD tv yet, what are good Blu Ray players to go with, or should I ask what is the best bang unit for the dollar. any comments on the LG BD 390 it's a little pricey but any other suggestions


Thanks
Chet

 

[Alex19]

I owned probably 20 Blu Ray movies before I owned my HDTV. Blu Ray is the next gen and in my opinion, buying DVD's is a waste of money now. For me personally, I always buy movies. I don't like renting. Buying a Blu Ray Player before the HDTV was definintely the right way to go for me.

The LG 390 is an awesome Blu Ray player. It comes with wireless capabilities right out of the box for Netflix, BD Live, and convenient updates. And 7.1 analog audio out for those totally nuts about their audio or if your receiver doesn't have HDMI ports or just can't decode HD sound.

Best bang for the buck? I would go with the Samsung 3600. They're the same price and most of the time you'll see both the 390 and 3600 on sale at the same time. The 3600 does everything the 390 does plus Pandora internet radio streaming. I did hear that the 3600 doesn't upconvert as good as other players and seemed to skip and freeze from time to time during fast action. It just might have been a bad player because all the ones I've seen hooked up look amazing.

It you're not wanting to pay 349-399 I would go with the next step down with a Samsung 1600 for 249-299. I hooked it up to the new 55" Samsung LED 7100 and it looked beautiful. Just doesn't come with wireless and the 7.1 audio out. But if you're not all that crazy about audio and don't care about wireless at the moment and wouldn't mind buying a 50 dollar wireless adapter in the future, the 1600 is great.

(I have a Playstation 3. Thats great too.)

 

[chetc]

Hi Alex

I am not up to date on alot of this stuff, can you give me a rundown on what wireless and netflix ready will do.

Chet

 

[Stephen Tu]

Netflix requires an existing Netflix account. This starts at $10.99/month for an account w/ unlimited Blu-ray + streaming. For this you get 1 DVD or Blu-ray mailed out to you at any given time; when you return it they mail the next one on your list. You can pay more to get more discs at a time, like I pay $16.99 for 2 at a time.

Now this streaming thing is they have a bunch of mostly older movies & TV shows, some 12k titles or so, that you can watch over the internet on a PC, through newer BD players like Samsung/LG, and other devices like TivoHD/Xbox & some new TV sets. These you browse on the web and add to a list, then you can stream these directly to your player over the internet, watch immediately without having to wait for discs to be mailed. The selection leaves something to be desired (only about 1/7 of the movies I want to see are available this way), and the quality varies considerably between titles (only a few hundred are available in HD, & their encodes are not as good as Blu-ray; SD is variable, usually somewhat worse than DVD). Also there is no 5.1 audio on these yet. But it is a free add-on to the main mail subscription, and a good way to catch up on older titles while waiting for your next BD to arrive. I wouldn't want to watch an action/sci-fi/comic movie on it, due to the lack of 5.1. Nor would I watch a new release movie that they didn't have an HD encode of, I'd rather see the Blu-ray. But there are still plenty of titles to see, and it rates to improve in the future (more HD encodes, adding 5.1 eventually).

Wireless only helps if your Blu-ray is not located close to a wired ethernet connection, and you have a wireless router to connect to instead.

Also for good quality streaming you need reasonably fast internet, preferrably 4+, 5+ Mbps otherwise quality will drop particularly for the HD titles.

 

[Alex19]

Haha. That basically summed it up. ^^^

I like the wireless mainly for Pandora and the ease of updating the Blu Ray player. Like computers, manufacturers come out with updates for players to keep them running to their full potential, without updating you're gonna buy a new Blu Ray disk and it'll say it can't play maybe 6 months from purchase of the player. Without wireless, you would need to download the update from the computer, put it to CD or flash drive and then to the player. It's really easy to do either way but we as Americans love to be as lazy as possible. And Pandora is pretty sweet. Listen to music through your sound system out of your player.

For what I have, I like the Samsung BDP1600. You can always go wireless later IF you choose to do so for like 50 bucks or so.

 

[Stephen Tu]

Oh, I forgot to mention Netflix is a few bucks cheaper per month (8.99/month 1 disc, 13.99/month 2 disc) if you only rent DVD not Blu-ray. Forgot that you don't have HDTV yet. Also the loss in quality for streaming vs. disc won't be as noticeable on an old smaller SDTV.

Wireless depends entirely on where your networking ports are located. I would never pay the extra $100 for the LG390 over the 370, for my TV; since my DSL router happens to be located on top of my equipment rack, I can just wire Ethernet directly to it. I'd only get wireless if I were to set up a system in another room. Alex's "have to download update to CD/flash drive" warning only applies if you have neither wireless nor wired connection to the internet, which would be a waste of a Netflix capable player. Also, the Pandora (internet radio service) he mentioned is only available on the Samsung models, not the LG.

 

I am looking forward to the Oppo, anyone out there have one running with yamaha 3800 and jvc rs10 combo?