CUSTOM INSTALLATION HOW-TO

The Short Form

Price $499 / sonystyle.com / 877-865-7669

Snapshot

Sony's basic player delivers the pleasures of Blu-ray at a relatively painless price.

Plus

•Crisp, punchy picture with Blu-ray Discs •Low price for a Blu-ray player •Quick startup and disc-load times

Minus

•No decoding options for lossless Dolby and DTS audio formats •Lacks Ethernet connectivity

Key Features

•1080p high-def output •Upscales DVDs to 1080p via HDMI •1080p/24-fps True Cinema output option •Onboard Dolby Digital Plus decoding •AVCHD-format disc playback •Outputs: HDMI, component-, composite-, and S-video; coaxial and optical digital audio, 6-channel analog audio, and stereo analog audio •17 x 14.9 x 3.1 in; 9 lb

SETUP Setup of the S300 in my system went down mostly smoothly, excepting a few hiccups that I'll address shortly. I connected it to an Anthem AVM 50 preamp/processor via HDMI and also ran a set of component-video cables to the TV to test the player's component-video performance.

The S300 provides an Easy Setup option to help you configure audio and video outputs for your system, or you can visit the Audio, Video, and Options menus one by one. First, I set the player for YCbCr (digital component) video output from its HDMI jack (two other options are for using an RGB display or a set with a DVI input). I made sure 24p output was switched off, since my current 1080p TV doesn't support it. I next switched the player's HDMI audio output option from Auto to PCM. This simplified setup by allowing my processor to receive Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Digital Plus, and 5.1-channel PCM soundtracks as a multichannel PCM streams via HDMI.

PERFORMANCE Before I get into the player's video performance, let me first say that my original S300 sample was prone to occasional freeze-ups that required me to unplug and replug the machine to get it going again. And it didn't always play nice with the Anthem preamp: Sometimes an image appeared onscreen when I powered things up, and sometimes I had to restart both components several times to get to that point. These sorts of problems don't occur with the PS3 that I normally use for Blu-ray playback in my system, or with as a Samsung player that I also had on hand for testing. I requested a second sample, which didn't freeze up but proved even more reluctant to make the required HDMI handshake with my Anthem preamp. This sort of voodoo is a fairly common occurrence with HDMI hookups; when I connected the second S300 directly to the TV, a picture appeared with no problem at all.

When things did work smoothly, though, the player delivered fantastic picture quality from movies on Blu-ray Disc. In Letters from Iwo Jima, for example, details of the rough island landscape - with its deeply creviced hills and dark sandy beaches - really popped from the screen. And when watching a scene where Japanese troops practice target-shooting on a hillside, I was struck by the near-3D quality of the brushy vegetation surrounding the soldiers; the fine, thin branches extending from each bush looked distinct as opposed to blurring into a mass. Picture contrast from this and other reference-quality discs was also consistently punchy and satisfying with the S300. And colors showed a wide range of subtle hues, even in a film like Iwo Jima, which has a desaturated "period look" to it. The player's high-def performance from its component-video output was also very good, although the picture came across a bit softer than with HDMI.