I Need help in choosing a Blu Ray player?
New HDTV and 7.1 Surround system. Need to purchase a blue ray player. Not into gaming. Just need one to play DVD’s, blu ray and cd’s. With so may on the market with wildly varying prices, what specs do i need to look for in purchasing one for my needs.
my receiver is a yamaha rx-v863
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They all play Blu-ray movies more or less the same, so the differences are in the build quality/components, and in the features re extras and connectivity.
First question is whether you are interested in on-line extras. If so you want a Profile 2.0 (BD Live) player. Otherwise if you are primarily interested in the movie and on-disk extras a Profile 1.1 player is fine.
Second is whether on-player decoding of the HD audio formats is required (i.e. your 7.1 receiver doesn’t do it .. look for terms like decodes "DTS HD Master" and "Dolby True HD"). If you need it you want a player with discrete multi-channel analog outputs. But if you have a new receiver it probably does the decoding, so you just need to connect via HDMI (don’t buy an expensive cable .. $10-$20 is fine).
If you have lots of DVDs, and/or value CD sound you might want to look for players that do an exemplary job of upscaling DVD and have good CD performance. One of the best players is the Pioneer BDP51FD … but it’s not Profile 2.0. However, the techies at AVS Forum consider it the best as far as build quality, tweekability, Blu-ray and DVD video quality and CD reproduction. Others have rated the Panasonic and Sony players well … but the Pioneer is better. You can buy at 6ave.com for $284 (See link). Current owners are grabbing them since this is a great price for a player almost identical to the $800 Pioneer Elite version.
A few players (e.g. Samsung 2550 and PS3) will stream Netflix movies as well as play disks. Samsung players have, arguably, had the most problems of the name brands. The PS3 is the most flexible player but is more expensive than most stand alone players, It uses much more power, needs a separate remote and while it’s the fastest loading, DVD performance is mediocre.