Customer Reviews

Sony BDPS370 Blu-ray Player

5 star:		(185)
4 star:		(53)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

Length:: 5:25 Mins

I bought this to go with my Sony KDL-40W4500 - 40" Widescreen 100hz / 1080P Full HD Bravia LCD TV - With DLNA Technology & Freeview as I knew it would not only connect up simply but also be perfectly linked up on the Bravia's menu's and I could put aside my main remote or use either the TV or Blu-Ray one for most functions. The Blu-Ray one even has a handy off button for the TV as well as one for the Blu-Ray player.

Connecting up to the TV: Using a HDMI cable, I used the one I had already for my DVD player, had it for ages and is nice and solid. Snakebyte Mamba Premium 3D Audio/Video HDMI Cable (PS3/Xbox 360) and then plugged the player into the mains. Easy! If not this one then there are so many HMDI cables out there with great reviews that will do perfectly. Just search HDMI cable, Amazon Basics do sell a decent looking one for not much at all.

Connecting up to the Internet: We have a standard router and seeing as I will be using the online services such as iPlayer, 5 on demand, online film rental services and Youtube etc then I'll need a constantly good broadband supply to the system. I have used a couple of homeplugs/eplugs, which you may or may not know much about. They use the house electrical wiring (nothing technical or dangerous is required to be done, all external) to give you broadband direct link up with standard ethernet cables. We have one plug one next to the router upstairs and the other downstairs in the nearest plug to the Blu-Ray player.

The homeplugs we have are: Hercules ePlug 200 Duo (200Mbps Powerline Communication) 2 Adaptor Pack and have been great for the last year for Laptops, PC's, our consoles etc. Again I know there are some other ones out there, but I have some other Hercules products and they have always been reliable and this one is nice and solid (see my other video review on this) so recommend that one. Alternatively Sony do sell a WiFi adaptor, but I don't know too much about it and my house has old stone walls so WiFi would not get a great connection to our router upstairs.

Setup: This took maybe 5 mins max for the system to download the latest firmware, I recommend doing this once a month maybe, though I think the system does automatically tell you when it needs doing. It does appear that every time you use the online services like iplayer it will check configuration, so i recommend using something reliable like a homeplug or just have your router near the TV so you can go direct into it.

Used a few different files now through a USB stick going into the slot on the front of the player and all seem to work fine, divx files for movies, so far they have all been avi files and audio files in mp3. You can access video, audio and photo through the home screen where everything else can be found, just pick the usb and then your files from there. You can look at photos on there too, they look great on the big screen, really useful for showing the family holiday snaps. Most camera's are high res enough for good quality nowadays. Works fine with jpg's which is what most camera's use now. Just drop them onto your usb stick and away you go.

Tried attaching my Buffalo Juststore 500GB USB 2.0 Slimline Portable External Hard Drive - Black through the usb port at the front but i can confirm this did NOT work, just usb memory sticks as far as i can tell.

UPDATE 18th January 2011: After reading a review posted here titled Sony BDPS370 Blu-ray Player on 14 Jan 2011 it seems external hard drives can be connected after being formatted FAT32, it might be a bit technical for the average user, including me, but i'm willing to to give it a try, but not on my buffalo as that's my main ipod backup, will try with another one and update when i can confirm.

Picture and Sound Quality: On Blu-Ray's, I only have a couple so far but I can say it is incredible, I guess it does all depend what screen you have too and your speakers but with the Sony TV it looks and sounds amazing. On the DVD's I have used I can see a noticeable difference in the quality and I'm sure the sound has improved too. Started going through my collection again to re-experience them.

Build Quality, everything is really solid and well made and I like that the buttons are almost hidden and the unit is very small and sleek, none of that nasty big clicky buttons. The Remote is as expected, nice and solid and just a different size to the TV one.

Can't recommend this enough for it's value and quality. Would totally recommend using with a Sony TV though to improve your experience further.

UPDATE 5th January 2011: After a few people asking about whether the player makes a high pitched wirring noise, according to other reviews it is whilst playing Blu-rays and noticeable when in quiet moments in films and some say it gets quieter continiously and dissapears about half way through the movie. From me at the moment from the couple I have tried I don't recall it being present at all. I will be trying this out and listening closely tonight and will most likely post up a video review late tonight to display my findings and anything else,so check back tomorrow. Will also update the written review.

LATEST UPDATE 5th January 2011: Reported High Pitch Noise Test. Tested 2 blu-rays and no high pitched noises at all during playback were heard. If your one does that then I suggest sending it back for a replacement as my first one is perfect!

UPDATE 17th January 2011: Still working fantastic with no problems reported. really like the remote and the fwd button as it just skips you fwd at 15sec jumps, which is great for box sets like 24 where the 2mins of each episode are updates from the last, getting you to the action in just a few clicks!

UPDATE 18th January 2011: After Trying 4 types of files via the USB stick in the USB port I can confirm that for me AVI and MP4 files DID work and MOV and MKV files DID NOT work. If anyone finds different please do let me know.

UPDATE 20th January 2011: Someone asked me about LAN setup, so I've just copied the setup instructions from the manual here:

***Connecting to the Network***

Wired Setup
Use a LAN cable to connect to the LAN (100)terminal on the player.
To set the network settings
Select "Network Settings," "Internet
Settings," then "Wired Setup" (page 26), and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the setup.

USB Wireless Setup
Turn off the player, then connect the USB
Wireless LAN Adapter (UWA-BR100 only available as of January 2010) to the USB jack on the front or rear of the player.
The USB Wireless LAN Adapter may not be available in some regions/countries.

If you find this useful, why not give me a thumbs up :) Thank you!

UPDATE 21st Jan: Just read an announcement that the Opera Web browser will be available in the future for use with the Sony Bravia TV's and Blu-Ray players. However, this is NOT available yet. Good news for the future though. If you have a Wii you will probably already be using opera browser for internet through your TV though. I'll update when it's available.

Also check out the comments section for lots of questions from Amazon customers, the answers from myself and many other very helpful Amazon customers too. Thank you everyone for your input! :)

I've never been one for Sony's hi-fi gear as I prefer the sound of other manufactures' equipment, but I had been looking for a blu-ray player that met my requirements for over a year now. I was waiting for Oppo's BDP-831, which was inexplicably cancelled about a week after receiving 5 star reviews in the major home cinema and hi-fi magazines. Then the Cambridge Audio 650BD came out for the about same price as the Oppo's SRP, but had worse quality DACs and Video scaler, which put me off.

Then the Sony came out that played most of the disc types that the Oppo and Cambridge Audio players (all but DVD-Audio) for less than half the price of those players. Chuck in iPlayer support and I was sold!

I'm very glad I decided to get this player. It loads Blu-Ray films faster than a Playstation 3, DVDs faster than my old Denon 1920 DVD player. DVD up-scaling is strong, with the exception of line drawn animation (like Family Guy or The Simpsons) which sometimes causes thin horizontal lines to shake and break up. Blu-Ray playback is excellent and stable, provided you have a TV that can display 720p or 1080p at 24 fps.

On-line content was fairly good, but I was unable to play HD content from LoveFilm or YouTube without buffering problems on my "up to 8Mb" from Tiscali (which was no faster than when I had their "up to 2Mb" service). iPlayer has no such problems though as the BBC's servers are much faster than the afore mentioned services.

A nice surprise was finding that the USB playback feature does support H.264/AVC video in a .MKV container (it's not mentioned in the blurb, but is mentioned in the manual), so you can playback all those (legally acquired) TV shows you've downloaded from the Internet.

Multi-region DVD playback can be achieved via universal remote (e.g. One4all, with the magic button, and Logitech Harmony) hacks, which are the same as they were for the BDP-S360 (easily found via a Google search). There is no such easy hack for multi-region Blu-Ray playback however. On some players multi-region Blu-Ray playback can be achieved via a hardware hack, but that would invalidate your warranty, so for most it's not worth the risk. However, region coding on Blu-Ray discs is optional and many "region A" Blu-Ray discs are actually region free.

If I had one niggle with the player it would be that it doesn't have built in wireless networking, and the Sony wireless network USB dongle is an expensive add-on which sells for 5 times the going price of other wireless network USB dongles. This alone though is not enough for me to dock a star on an otherwise exemplary player.

DLNA Update (updated 27-3-2012):
------------

Having recently built a NAS machine (using FreeNAS), which has UPnP/DLNA support, I thought I'd give the BDP-S370's DLNA client feature a whirl. The first thing I found was that the Sony player was quite fussy and I was unable to get it to connect to FreNAS's FUPPES UPnP service (despite trying the DLNA and PlayStation 3 profiles). I started to search around for alternatives that I could install on my main Windows 7 64 bit PC (with an eye for using Windows Home Server 2011 instead of FreeNAS). I tried Tversity, but no joy, then I tried the Sony recommended Serviio, but the software didn't function at all. Finally I tried TVMOBiLi, which was picked up by the BDP-S370 immediately.

With TVMOBiLi's transcoding feature disabled, I was able to test a range of formats including MP3, FLAC, AVI (DIVX), MKV, MPEG-2, MPEG-TS, MPEG-M2TS and MP4. FLAC wasn't supported, which is no surprise, but MKV, MP4 and MPEG-M2TS were also not supported, which is odd considering that the BDP-S370 is quite happy playing these formats on a USB hard drive. (Strangely MPEG-TS files have the M2TS icon the the Xrossbar UI, despite MPEG-TS and MPEG-M2TS being different and the BDP-S370's inability to play MPEG-M2TS via DLNA).

I then turned on TVMOBiLi's transcoding feature and was able to then playback a FLAC (transcoded to LPCM, sans meta-data) as well as an MKV file, transcoded to MPEG (though I'm unsure as to which flavour of MPEG). The FLAC file had a pause of around 3-8 seconds before playback commenced, with the MKV file it was more like 20-40 seconds. When the transcoded MKV started playing back it had a noticeable judder in it, no doubt caused by the computer to do real-time transcoding of a 720p MKV.

I then re-muxed the 720p MKV into a MPEG-TS stream (using tsMuxeR) and tried playback again. Playback was smooth which suggests that the problem was indeed the transcoding (and not the wireless network).

Another thing that struck me, when browsing a large music share, was how inadequate the Xrossbar UI is when dealing with a large number of files in any given folder. Thankfully TVMOBiLi creates several pseudo folders which make navigation easier (e.g. Artist -> A-C -> Allison Crowe -> Secrets), but even then it is still a rather long winded process.

I recently tried Serviio out again with a Windows Home Server (WHS) 2011 PC (a HP Micro Server) as a new Serviio plugin for WHS has been released and it worked well, though the PC was underpowered for transcoding video, so I stuck to DIVX AVI, MPEG and MPEG-TS for the video files. Recently I found that tsMuxeR was no longer working with some MKVs, but I've recently come across a new tool called Rebox.NET, which can convert MKVs to MPEG-TS (without transcoding), and it seems to work with more files than tsMuxeR does.

Truth be told, the BDP-S370's DLNA support is not overly useful due to its weak video container support - connecting a USB HDD is a better (not to mention easier and cheaper) option.

Wireless networking update (new):
---------------------------------

We all know that the official Sony dongle is extortionate at nearly 70% as much as the player itself. I was on the Sony forums and a user mentioned this Netgear adaptor: Netgear WNCE2001 Universal WiFi Internet adaptor 802.11n, which is cheaper (it works by connecting to the BDP-370's LAN socket and uses its USB socket for power). You'll need a laptop to set it up, but for the saving it's worth the additional hassle if you are comfortable with setting up a wireless network.

This Buffalo adaptor should also work Buffalo AirStation Nfiniti Dual Band Wireless-N Ethernet Converter, Access Point and Bridge - Wireless bridge - 802.11 a/b/g/n - desktop. It has two LAN sockets, so it would be useful if you have say an internet connected TV as well as an internet connected Blu-ray player. The downside is that, unlike the Netgear, it occupies a mains power socket.

I haven't personally tried either solution as my BDP-370 is close enough to the router to be connected via LAN cable, but I thought the option was worth mentioning. If you do try either, please post a comment to let me know how you got on.

Sound Review (Updated):
-------------------
I've now had the opportunity to assess the Sony BDP-S370's sound vs. my Denon 1920 (a DVD/SACD/CD player). When playing SACDs (Super Audio CDs) the old Denon beat the Sony hands down, achieving greater detail and clarity, while delivering a more realistic sound. I somewhat expected this as the Denon has a DSD based DAC which is the native format of a SACD, while the Sony has to convert the DSD signal to a PCM one as it has a PCM based DAC.

I then moved onto an Audio CD and a 24/96 DVD, both of which are PCM based, which means the Denon should be at a disadvantage. However, the Denon once again delivered better detail and clarity, while once again delivering a more realistic sound.

So in summary while the Sony is a good performer in movie sound, it is less accomplished as a music player and could do with some UK tuning or some component upgrades. However, perhaps this is slightly unfair as the Denon's price as new was £100 more than the Sony's new price, however the Denon is also 5 years old so things should have improved since then. I believe that Sony's next player up Sony BDP-570 is supposed to have improved audio circuitry and 7.1 analogue outputs, but if other reviews are right, then this upgrade has done nothing to improve the musicality. So I guess I'm saying that if you are more of a music person than a film person, then the Sony players may not be the right fit for you.

Further to my previous comments, I tried using the analogue audio outputs on my Samsung TV instead of those on the the Sony player. When I did the sound was immediately and substantially improved. I can therefore conclude the BDP-S370's weakness with sound lies with the analogue outputs (OPAMPs/DACs). This means that if you have a home cinema amplifier with HDMI, then you can effectively sidestep this weakness.

Internet Video Update:
----------------------
Sony have just added 'Demand Five' (Five's catch-up service) to the internet video section. I watched Archer and part of Chinese Made Easy, both streamed comfortably with excellent quality, which was as good as (if not better than) Freeview (SD)!

Unfortunately I just discovered that the Drama section (i.e. CSI, Grey's Anatomy, etc.) is not available via the Bravia Internet Video version of Demand Five, which Five informed me is due to licensing issues. This majorly affects its usefulness as Five's main shows are dramas, but you can still use it to catch up on Home and Away and Neighbours.

NEW: Sony have added their own video on demand service, Qriocity, which contains a meagre selection of films in SD and HD. Pricing for the Qriocity films ranges from 4.99 (for a new release in HD) down to around 2.49 (for an old film in SD).

MKV Support Update:
-------------------
The MKV support is a bit patchy. If a MKV contains AVC/H.264 video with a profile "High @ Level 5.1" then the video will not play and you'll be shown an on screen message saying "file corrupt or unsupported". This is true of many hardware MKV players and as such most new MKVs are created at "High @ level 3.1" or "High @ level 4.1" now days.

The strange thing is that the profile level is a suggestion, rather than an absolute, so if you can change the profile from Level 5.1 to Level 4.1 then most media files play fine. I used a tool called tsMuxeR to convert (not transcode) from a MKV (Level 5.1) to a M2TS (Level 4.1), which took around 8 seconds, and the resulting file played fine on the BDP-S370. This should work on the majority of files, however you may have to end up re-encoding some files which takes an age.

USB Drive Support Update:
-------------------------
I also tried using the player with an external 500GB USB 2.0 hard drive. This worked fine, but the file system has to be FAT32, which Windows appears not to support FAT32 on large volumes, Windows 7 only allows ExFAT formatting, which is unsupported by the BDP-S370. The solution is to use a third party FAT32 formatter (I used Fat32Format) to format the drive. The downside of FAT32 is that it only allows a single file size of 4GB, meaning that larger videos may have to be split into several parts.

Another cool thing is that my USB SDHC memory card reader worked just like any other USB memory stick and I was able to view the AVCHD Lite video and photos taken on my Panasonic TZ7 camera. The photos in particular looked great in 1080p, much better than the TZ7's 720p HDMI.

One other thing I've noticed is that if you plug in a thumb drive or external hard drive, then you'll find the player creates a folder called BUDA, which the player uses for Blu-ray Live data. If you want to delete the data you can do so from the players menu.

Just got this today for a relatives birthday present. Extremely fast and slick but was at first disappointed that the BBC iplayer wasnt available this afternoon when i looked for it. Just got an update this evening (31/3/2010) and now BBC iplayer works perfectly, and yes, BBC HD works like a dream on iplayer. Had no problem streaming Lovefilm movies to my TV although I consider myself lucky as our Sky broadband is around 13 meg speed in real terms. Another thing is that it looks like Lovefilm will go HD with their service on this player as you can watch HD trailers of the latest films streamed from the net. Youtube HD videos also work here unlike the LG370 we have which just streams SD at the minute. Hope this helps you makin up your mind about this player. We bought it for the online and catchup tv facility. One last thing is the HD streaming to the player looks the same quality as blu ray discs although our TV is 720p only. Lovefilm SD movies are the same quality as ordinary DVDs (or near DVD at least)

I have now had three of these great looking, great value and futureproof Sony blu-ray players. However, there is one problem consistent with all three, and that is the sound cuts out randomly while playing any sort of format. As my set-up is incredibly simple (HDMI direct into Sony W4500 HDTV) I cannot explain or rectify the problem. Amazon have been extremely helpful as usual; Sony have not - as usual.

This annoying fault is such a shame as the machine is otherwise brilliant. The machine itself looks stunning and for it's compact size is very well built. DVDs look great, blu rays look awesome and anything on a memory stick (DivX, DivXHD, MKV) all look like near blu-ray quality, with no flicker or stutter evident on other machines.

Sadly, at present I have to give this machine a three star rating, but if anyone out there can help me solve the irritating sound problem, it will be immediately altered to a five star.

Got this delivered Saturday. After unpacking, was surprised how much smaller this is height wise compared with my S350. The player is now in gloss black, which I do prefer, apart from the inevitable dusting.

Very, very easy to setup and load times are also very fast, even from a cold start probably at least 75% faster than the S350.

One nice update is the removal of that bright blue 24 fps led indicator and also the eject button is now on the remote. The drawer mechansim is now a standard tray loading, so the drop down flap has gone.

Performance is quite simply outstanding with no issues. Future firmware updates promise BBC iplayer amongst other things.

I purchased the Sony Sony BDPS350 Blu-ray (B.R.)Disc Player 1080p Full HD almost 2 years ago. At the time Blue ray was cutting edge technology but having bought a full HD TV (Rather than HD ready)I knew the money I had splashed out on it would have been simply wasted if I didn't utilise it to its full capability.

To be honest I wasn't really in the market for a new B.R. player, but while the picture quality was A1, little things about my previous model would have me pulling my hair out. Such as the time taken to load the disc, the time taken to fast forward or playback and of course how pressing play with the tray out would do nothing.

Well having a butchers at Amazon and I came across the first review for this machine by JK Allum and so impressed by his words was I, I thought what the heck and clicked 'Add to shopping basket'

Well it arrived today and here is what I have to say;
1) Faster start up.(Much faster on par with your average DVD player)
2) The same with accessing the disc via FF or RW
3) The tray closes when I press play.
4) It actually has the same footprint as the 350, but is thinner.
5) 2 USB SOCKETS (one front,one at the back)
6) 1 HDMI socket,1 optic socket and the usual red and yellow audio sockets.
7) The incoming power cable (think kettle lead) is built in.
8) The remote isn't anything to write home about and is around half the size of the one I received with the 350. However I found the old one works just fine so I'm using that. (It's built to a much better standard)
7) The machine doesn't feel as well built as the one it replaced, but that and the remote are the only things which you could actually say were better on the older model.

So how does it play? Well seeing as I've had a BR player since Sept 2008, I thought the picture quality couldn't be beaten. Well this model does that in spades. I watched the LOTR 'Two Towers' tonight and blown away just doesn't exemplify how I felt. The picture is sharper (If that is possible) the colours are much more vibrant and the sound (I use a Yamaha sound bar) is a vast improvement on the DVD version. I then had a quick scan through the Superman BR which to be honest didn't impress me that much when I bought it along with my first BR machine and the difference between the two machines is simply quite plain to see. (Which means I may have wasted a lot of money on giving away all the BR discs I bought and which I thought were bad cross-overs)

This machine is a vast improvement on the older model, which may explain why its this months top rated BR machine in 'What HIfi' and the cheapest. So am I happy?
Like a Ginger Tom out on the tiles.

Purchased this a couple of weeks ago. After connecting it to the internet and updating it, it works brilliantly. Set up is easy. Picture and sound quality are top notch. Start-up time is about 3 seconds, which is about 5 times faster than my old player. Feature list is great - I'm especially pleased that it plays SACDs. The quality of upscaled DVDs is impressive - I'll be replacing some of my favourite DVDs with Blu Rays, but for a lot of them the quality is just fine. It is a bit of a drag that it doesn't come with wireless out of the box. I found the Sony dongle a bit too expensive, so I picked up a Belkin 802.11g Wireless G Gaming Adapter which works well and is a lot cheaper than the Sony thing.
So if you have an HD TV and are looking for a brilliant Blu Ray player at a fair price, this is the one.

The rest of the reviews pretty much sum up this Blu-Ray player.

I usually buy Panasonic or Sony products, for TV's I think Panasonic usually have the edge, but in DVD / Blu-Ray players, Sony hold the crown in my opinion.

It's quick, looks smart, neat and moder, the picture quality is outstanding, the ease of use, the menu interface is superb), sound is great.

I cannot think of any bad points, im sure someone will be on here soon saying how it doesn't make their tea for them or that it does not display a certain tone of colour with pinpoint definition (that 99.9% of people would never need nor notice).

The extras are just bonus's, built in youtube, built in iPlayer (which is FAR better quality than using iPlayer on a PC/Laptop) online video rental downloads...The list goes on.

If you are looking for a VERY reasonably priced blu-ray player that will do everything you need PLUS more, I highly recommend the Sony BDPS-370.

I've had this unit for a little while and hope to answer some of the questions I had before purchasing.

Blu-ray playback.

As you'd probably expect from a Sony machine, Blu-ray playback is flawless. The BDP-S370 is by far the fastest machine at loading a disc I've owned, taking around 10-20 seconds for most discs, regardless of menu complexity. Video and audio quality are both exceptional on my setup - a marked improvement over a budget machine I'd picked up at Argos last year for around £100. BD-Live is supported, although you'll need to have a USB drive attached (at the back of the unit) to activate this functionality. I think it's worth leaving one plugged in at all times - though note a 2GB drive can fill up quickly depending on the movies loaded!

DVD playback.

Although the BDP-S370 is not region-free out of the box, it can be made so quite easily by using the One 4 All remote hack (mentioned in other comments). Once unlocked, it will play discs from any region without problem, including region 0 (region free) discs and RCE protected region 1 discs. It will also play DVDs written onto DVD+-R/RW. The unit upscales with excellent results: far better than a Sky HD box in my experience.

DivX/XviD playback.

AVI files encoded with the DivX and XviD codecs can be played back via CD-R, DVD+-R, DVD+RW, BD-R, BD-RE or USB drive. The machine is not too fussy, either: I've successfully played files with packed bitstream and custom matrices - i.e. files that struggled on other hardware DivX players - without problem. (I've yet to try a file with QPel or GMC, but I've read success stories on web forums.)

MKV playback.

The unit will play back MKV files from CD-R, DVD+-R, DVD+RW, BD-R, BD-RE or USB drive. All of the expected video and audio codecs are supported: AVC/VC1/MPEG2 video, AC3/DTS/AAC audio etc. If the MKV contains subtitles, they are rendered clear and readable and follow the behaviour set in the MKV (forced, optional, etc). The only quibble with MKV playback is that the unit is incapable of playing files with AVC level 5.1 video, giving a "file not supported" error message. If your MKV file does have level 5.1 video (which you can check with a tool called MediaInfo), it can be converted to (compatible) level 4.1 using a program called TSMuxer. Google "5.1 to 4.1 mkv" for a guide; the process takes around 10 minutes and involves no quality loss.

There is one notable drawback to MKV playback from a USB hard drive, however: NTFS formatted drives are not recognised by the s370. That means the USB hard drive must be formatted to FAT32, which in turn limits the size of any one file to 4gb (smaller than most movie backups). Such files can only be played from DVD or over DLNA (see below).

DLNA Media streaming capabilities.

A firmware update earlier in 2010 enabled media streaming to the S370 from compatible devices. Although in theory this allows files to be streamed from a PC to the device via ethernet, I've found the experience mixed - and very much dependent on the software used on the PC to stream files to the S370. If you just want to stream hi-def MKV files, I've had the most success with a program called Mezzmo, but that seems unable to stream AVI files. I get the impression that the media streaming functionality is currently at an early stage, almost in beta; if you absolutely need that functionality, I'd recommend a dedicated box like the WDTV Live instead.

Other online capabilities.

The UK edition of this machine comes with a host of online video streaming services, the most notable of which are LoveFilm, Youtube and BBC iPlayer. All three work very well, although the LoveFilm service requires a monthly subscription to one of their DVD packages with streaming (well worth it, in my view). iPlayer quality is equivalent to BBC through Freeview or Sky to my eyes and has become a much used feature!

Overall.

The S370 is an exceptional device, capable of playing my entire library of Blu-rays, DVDs, DivX and MKV files. Although there are a few minor quibbles (with certain level 5.1 MKV files and the media streaming functionality), neither require much effort to workaround and both can presumably be fixed by a future firmware upgrade. Overall, this is the one of the best value Blu-ray players on the market today, and should be given serious consideration for your home entertainment needs. 5 out of 5.

The big selling point for this player is its ability to play SACD disks in stereo and 5.1 format. I know SACD is not a popular format but it is better than standard CD's if you have the choice. I have held off buying a Blu-ray simply because I was waiting for a Blu-ray that would play my SACD's in full 5.1 surround sound. Until recently only a few DVD players could do this and I was having to simply listen to my Hybrid SACD disks on a standard stereo SACD/CD player. I would happily have paid a lot more for a more up market blu-ray player if that was necessary to get SACD 5.1 but was amazed to discover that it was only this so-called entry level player that had the feature ... and at an equally astonishing low price. Better still the player has exceptional reviews and loads of features. Mind, my other needs are no greater than most, good sound and picture (which probably all blu-rays deliver these days) and upscaling of my vast collection of old DVD's.
Delivery from amazon was next day and the machine was tiny compared to my old Toshiba DVD player (which was still doing a decent job so is now in my daughter's flat). From the reviews, I expected Blu-ray and DVD's films to be stunning and was not disappointed but playing Hybrid (3 layer)SACD's in 5.1 is a fantastic bonus that should not be overlooked by the small minority of us Hi-Fi enthusiasts who enjoy this format. I can't recommend this superb player enough. I know many others have already written more helpful reviews but I needed to add that anyone who enjoys Hybrid SACD's, this is a great value player for you. Those who have only experienced music on CD can now buy their music on Hybrid SACD (which is fully compatible with CD) and discover what they have been missing ... and check out the superb Linn catalogue with great jazz artists on Hybrid SACD's. Secret Love [Sacd/CD Hybrid]Drawn to All Things: Songs of Joni Mitchell [Sacd/CD Hybrid]Waterloo Sunset[Hybrid SACD]
With this Sony player connected into your Hi-Fi for surround sound, the superior experience and clarity of SACD is now available to all owners of this great Blu-ray player.