As an avid film fan, I considered it essential to get on board with the HD technology, which I did shortly after the format war was over. In a hurry to be a full participant, I went for a middle-priced BDP and settled on Sony's BDP S300. After six months of use, I can't say that I share the seething contempt for it I've seen elsewhere among these reviews, but I can't recommend it either, especially now that prices are coming down.
The first problem is, it's not fully functional in playing all the features on Blu-ray discs. A common bonus feature on the bigger titles -- and becoming more common all the time -- is the ability to access a PIP commentary while the movie is playing. The Sony BDP-S300 doesn't permit this capability. It never even occurred to me that a BDP wouldn't provide access to all that a disc offered, and I'm sure it never occurred to other people as well. I believed that the machines might load at different speeds, and default screens might look different, but I believed the features on discs would operate the same. It's quite stingy of Sony, really, to not provide this capability, since it's just a matter of a firmware update. I don't know if all manufacturers are committing the same rationing of features, but I know what to look for in the future.
Here's another problem. In the BDP's audio/video setup menu, you're provided a video output option of 24p. This puts the player and HDTV in sync with the 24-frames-per-second strobe rate of filmed material. If you have a 1080p HDTV, this would be the preferred setting. After I selected 24p, the player stumbles between functions, such as going from the static main disc menu, which does not use the 24-frames-per-second output, to the start of the film, which does. There's a data dropout during the switch, as the BDP adjusts to the different types of source material, a dropout that's registered by a brief display of a blank blue screen and the HDTV's default notices. This is not a TERRIBLE bug, but it's a bug nonetheless. I'm not sure a firmware update can fix that, but I informed Sony of it just the same.
Because I'm not highfalutin when it comes to special features, I'm not bothered much about the lack of access to those cuter extras. As for the dropouts, those sudden bright blue stabs in the eyes occur only during transition between modes, so they remain only as a minor annoyance, mostly as a reminder that I paid too much for an inferior machine. But it delivers the hi-def image as good as any other, and there's been no Blu-ray discs it wouldn't play, though two of them required I install the firmware updates. I downloaded the updates directly from the site, which was a problem the first time because the instructions are wrong (they say to burn it to CD instead of a DVD; the BDP won't read the CD). The bottom line is that I got what I wanted most, so I won't rail against this machine like others I've seen here. However, if Sony doesn't come up with firmware that permits full access to all features on a mainstream title, and if I have to buy a different machine to achieve full functionality, that machine won't be a Sony, just on principle. Prior to this purchase, I trusted that the Sony brand always meant quality. I'm not so sure now, so I'll give another manufacturer a try. Buy Sony BDP-S300 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player!
