WHF team - a simple question about the Sony BDP S550

[Dan Turner]

Hi, the release of Band of Brothers and imminent release of Dark Knight have finally made up my mind - It's time to upgrade to Blu-ray.

I have pretty much decided upon the Sony BDP-S550, but I just want to know in your opinion is it as good at playing DVDs as my current Denon DVD-1940? I want one device to serve all purposes, but as I have a sizeable DVD collection the performance with those is at least as important as with Blu-ray. TV is a Pioneer PDP427XD.

Thanks!

 

[mattjax05]

Hi, i'm confident that the scaler in the Sony will be on par if not better than the Denon. Scalers are getting better and better in decent newer equipment and I believe the Sony will follow the same path. I have a Denon 1930 and while i'm impressed with the upscaling, it can be bettered in budget blu ray players.

 

[Gerrardasnails]

Dan Turner:
Hi, the release of Band of Brothers and imminent release of Dark Knight have finally made up my mind - It's time to upgrade to Blu-ray.

I have pretty much decided upon the Sony BDP-S550, but I just want to know in your opinion is it as good at playing DVDs as my current Denon DVD-1940? I want one device to serve all purposes, but as I have a sizeable DVD collection the performance with those is at least as important as with Blu-ray. TV is a Pioneer PDP427XD.

Thanks!

I might be the person to help you. I had a 1940 before I bought my S550. The BD player edges the Denon with dvd playback - not a lot in it though.

 

[Dan Turner]

Thanks - Just the answer I was looking for! I feel a purchase coming on......

 

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I have a 550 and was wondering if the upscaling is always done ... what I mean is that I can't find an option in the menu which switches upscaling On / Off

Cheers

Ken

 

[professorhat]

How much upscaling is done by the Blu-Ray player is determined by the HDMI resolution output - if you have it set to 1080p, the Blu-Ray player is upscaling DVDs to 1920 x 1080 resolution, if you have it set to 720p, the Blu-Ray player is upscaling DVDs to 1280 x 720 resolution.

What isn't upscaled by the player will then be upscaled by the TV i.e. if you set your Blu-Ray player to output at 576p and the TV is a Full HD 1080p set, the TV will then take the standard DVD resolution and upscale it to 1080p so that it fills the screen. Generally, the Blu-Ray player is the best place to do the upscaling, but it can be worth a little experimentation to check this. Of course, when watching Blu-Rays, you should always have the player set to output in your TV's native resolution (or higher if you prefer and the TV can handle it), otherwise you'll be losing detail out of the Blu-Ray picture.

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the quick response. It's running to an InFocus IN80 which is saying that it is receiving 1080p from Bluray.

Cheers again

Ken