Blu-ray Player Showdown

5. Sony BDP-S350

The Remote

As useful as the remotes that Panasonic supplies--only more stylish--Sony's remote controls suffer from the same weakness: they don't have backlit buttons, which is a real annoyance if you want enjoy the true Home Cinema experience of watching movies in the dark.

The glow-in-the-dark labels used by Samsung to solve the same problem don't even get a look-in either.

With the BDP-S350, Sony is adding to the competition in the entry-level Blu-ray player market, where the market is already heating up with the Samsung BD-P1500 and Panasonic DMP-BD35.

Like the earlier S300, the new S350 is very shallow, meaning it should slide into even the smallest of spaces. 

At the back, the same set of input and output ports is there, including HDMI 1.3, composite and component video, an RJ45 Ethernet port, analog stereo and a USB host.

For some reason, this USB port is set very deeply and not all flash memory drives will fit.  If we were being cynical, we might accuse Sony of making the decision on purpose given that its own USB keys are the perfect size for it.

For digital audio, there's both an optical and a coaxial output.  Sony has also included an S-video port, an interesting decision that bucks recent trends.  You get the most out of a HD player using a HD TV and naturally enough, an HDMI cable.

The interface used is once again the famous XrossMediaBar system which made its debut on the PlayStation 3, and it's just as quick and intuitive as ever.  Just because it's simple to use though, doesn't mean it's not powerful: it even allows you to set the brightness of the LCD display on the front, or turn it off altogether for a real home cinema experience.

Apart from DTS-HD MA, the S350 can decode just about every audio format, meaning you can even connect a HDMI amplifier to enjoy PCM sound.  If you have an amplifier that does its own decoding, you will probably prefer to opt for a bit-stream signal.

The absence of 5.1 or 7.1 connectors means that you can't use older DD or DTS audio equipment, as only the 'core' Dolby signal is available via the optical or coaxial audio cables.

Test Results

This player does pretty well when it comes to actually reading Blu-ray discs, with a delay of “only” 53 seconds before showing the first frame of our test movie.  Very few players get under the symbolic barrier of one minute, and only the PlayStation 3 is truly impressive, at just 35 seconds.

The quality really is High Definition, with images that are as good as the competition from Samsung and Panasonic.  It seems that now that Blu-ray is becoming a mature standard, video quality is becoming a less important criterion for distinguishing between models as improvements take hold all around.

Upscaling of Standard Definition sources is equally impressive.  If we wanted to be really picky, we could suggest that it was just a notch behind the Panasonic BD55, but there's very little in it.  Either way, we couldn't identify any genuine problems with the S350's excellent work on this front.

What we were disappointed--or rather, confused--by was the fact that the S350 isn't compatible with DiVX or MP3 files. Although they aren't necessarily the most up-to-date codecs, a lot of people still swear by them. None of Sony's competitors have been foolish enough to leave out these important formats, either.

This is a very good Blu-ray player from Sony, whose main failing is the absence of DiVX compatibility, which is found almost universally amongst the competition.