Other Source Component Reviews

Sony PlayStation 3
The vaunted PlayStation 3 does just about everything you'd want in a consumer electronics product. It plays all discs (except HD DVDs), stores media, plays games, lets you surf the Web, eats babies, looks cool, and invites both envy and ridicule equally.

Its image quality seems to be roughly the same as the Pioneer's, and navigating via the regular controller wasn't too obnoxious once I got used to it. (A real remote is also available.) It switches between tracks the fastest of this bunch, and, along with the Pioneer, it's the only one that lets you advance and rewind frame by frame. (The others can only go forward per frame.) If it's already on, a disc will start nearly instantaneously. If you insert a disc with the unit off, it takes about 25 seconds to start the movie. The Samsung takes almost twice that time. This thing's computing power is really impressive.

Despite the fact that the PS3 has the computing power of a last-generation supercomputer, it can't (or should I say, doesn't) upconvert DVDs. Perhaps this is something Sony will add in the future, as the power is certainly there.

At $500 for the base version, how is this not the only Blu-ray player anyone should look at? Well, this is certainly the kind of sentiment I've been getting a lot of angry letters about. There is one very important aspect that these people seem to overlook—the sound. Your only analog choice is stereo; optical will only do Dolby Digital or

DTS. This is Home Theater magazine, after all, and sound is at least 50 percent of the experience. I can't recommend something that won't give most people the benefit of the new high-resolution audio formats on these discs. (For more on the new HD audio formats, see our Hook Me Up on page 34.) Like the other players, it will output uncompressed PCM to the few (but growing number of) devices on the market that will accept that. But, without multichannel analog outputs, most people will have to miss the high-resolution audio completely, and that I can't advocate. As more equipment becomes available that can accept uncompressed PCM over HDMI, I'll probably recommend the PS3 unreservedly (as long as you upgrade your receiver, too).

Pick Me! Pick Me!
The Pioneer's ability to output 1080p/24 makes a strong case for this player. That said, it's at least 50 percent more expensive than the others here. The PlayStation 3, despite its delays, is still ahead of its time. Its lack of analog multichannel outputs is a limiting factor in my book but apparently not to some others.

So, I guess it breaks down like this: If your TV doesn't accept 1080p/24 and you don't plan to upgrade to one that does, get the Samsung or the Philips. If your display does, get the Pioneer. If you have a receiver that can read the uncompressed PCM over HDMI, get the PS3. If you don't have such a receiver—and you don't care about audio—get the PS3. If you don't care about video, get a VCR.

There are two other BD players on the market that we couldn't get in time for this article, a Panasonic and a Sony. The latter also outputs 1080p/24 and is a little cheaper than the Pioneer. The Panasonic doesn't output 1080p/24, but it apparently isn't a Samsung clone, so it's more of a question mark. We'll check them out as soon as we can.