Reviews for Sony BDP-S301 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player BD/DVD/CD Playback with Bonus HDMI Cable

Total reviews: 5 of 13
Average Rating:

• HD is great, player is not | Rating: | Date: 2008-08-04

  I've had this player for about a year now. I get incredibly frustrated almost every time I use it. It takes about 1 minute to start up. While its booting, you cannot open the tray to put in a disc or take one out.
  
  I like many others have had the treat of a movie freezing up after about an hour. Then I play games with it for the next 20 minutes waiting for it to restart, and then deciding which part of the movie I am going to skip in order to at least see the end.
  
  Perhaps all Blu-ray players have these problems. I don't care. The technology is not where it needs to be. Save your money and wait for the next generation of players that have fixed these problems. I am much happier using my upscaling DVD player that I bought for half the price. The picture is nearly as good from where I sit, and the audio is just as good.

• Works great! so far...... | Rating: | Date: 2008-07-25

  I recently purchased my S301 for $270 brand new without reading the reviews first. As soon as I click pay, I thought to myself crap, I should have researched this a little further. Oh well, it was cheap. After reading good/mostly bad reviews from Amazon and other websites, I was disappointed and wished I didn't buy it. But I'm glad I did.
  
  I've had the S301 for two weeks now and, besides the slow load time (about 60-90 seconds), everything works perfectly. It hasn't skipped/froze on me and read all the Blu-ray/DVD movies just fine. The picture is amazing and the sound is great. I have a 46" 1080p Vizio and Panasonic Home Theatre - it's not a Sony or a Bose but hey it works :). I'll give it a few more weeks and see. I'm scared, I hope none of that bad stuff people say will happen to my player! Oh well, at least it wasn't super expensive.

• Baloney | Rating: | Date: 2008-07-22

  I'll have to say that I've seldom read such a load of baloney as is present in the "J. Preston" rambling, paranoid conspiracy theory review.
  
  My comment is not about this player specifically, but blu-ray players are a significant upgrade to the viewing and listening experience, not a conspiracy by Sony to control your life. ROFL
  
  There was once such a plan, the infamouse DIVX concocted by an LA law firm in combination with Circuit City and a couple of hardware producers, and it fell entirely flat on its face.
  
  The only disadvantage to Blu-ray is that it is still in the early adopter pricing levels, both for players and content. Now that the tug of war with HD-DVD is over, it will be the dominant viewing platform before very long at all .... and you won't have to worry about Sony controlling your life, brain washing you, demanding your first born child, or kidnapping you for secret medical experiments.

• If it's not Scottish, it's crap! | Rating: | Date: 2008-06-24

  Possibly the crappiest Sony product I've ever owned! The picture quality is indeed amazing, but the drawbacks to this first generation BD player is that it sucks. I remember purchasing a cheap Akai DVD player in 1999 and thinking "Damn, the latency from pressing the button to actually having something happen on the player is terrible!" I can say the same for this second-rate product with a first-class name. Every now and then the player will freeze. I've watched a great deal of BDs on here, courtesy of Netflix. It worked fine for awhile, but then for some reason the BD movies started freezing and I thought it was the discs. Turns out it was the player. Long story short: It's not worth the money yet. Wait to get it second hand if you really need a BD player, or wait until better, newer players come out!

• Sony BDP-S300 | Rating: | Date: 2008-06-16

  I have been a dedicated Sony customer, purchasing Sony products for most of my AV requirements. As a rule Sony products are very good performers for the price paid.
  I recently purchased the Sony BDP-S300 Blu-Ray player, along with a Toshiba HD-DVD player (HD-A30).
  When the Sony works, it's night and day between Blu-Ray and watching DVD's on our old DVD player. We have a very respectable sound system which pushes the audio through the full compliment of all the Klipsch Synergy III, -3 series speakers. It would be nice if we could hear the true audio that is encoded on the Blu-Ray. Strange that Sony has the concept but makes players that don't support it.
  And to make matters worse, this 4 month old player began to sporadically freeze up after watching about 1 hour of select, various movies. As of this time, I'm unaware how to unfreeze it other than to turn the player off, then back on, then find where we left off, and hope it begins to play without additional issues. That timespan is usually around 7-10 minuutes, waiting for shutdown, power up, loading the DVD and finding where we were. By then, one has almost lost interest in watching the movie altogether.
  In researching the web, many have the same issue, no one has the solution other that what we are already doing.
  But this problem isn't unique to just the Sony Blu-Ray. Our Toshiba HD-DVD player does the same thing, fixed by the same process.
  Some DVD's play all the way through, most don't. We have returned and replaced a number of HD-DVD's only to get replacements that reproduce the same problem.
  I'm almost thinking that the commercial Blu-Ray and HD DVD's are dual layer, as both units freeze (when they freeze) at about the 1 hour timeframe. It almost appears than when they try to begin reading the second layer, they lock up making that transition. When you stop, reboot and reload, you usually go past the layer shift, thus playing the second layer all the way through, along with missing segments of the movie.
  I have contacted both manufacturers concerning this, neither have responded.
  I never had much experience with Toshiba products, and based on the lack of their customer support (even though it's a discontinued product, it should still be supported under their warranty), it is doubtful that I will ever look to them for consideration of purchasing any of their other products. As far as Sony is concerned, I am genuinely surprised at their lack of support to a problem which is obviously becoming more and more prevalent on a product line that is becoming more and more popular.