Sony Blu-ray player BDP-S300 - price drop

Sony dropped the price of its budget Blu-ray player from $400 all the way down to $270 USD. It can be found at its new discounted price all over the web at retailers like Amazon and at brick and mortar stores like Circuit City and Best Buy.

Since the Black Friday shopping weekend saw discounts as low as $100 on Toshiba's competing HD DVD player, and many believe the next-gen DVD format war has been weighted toward the HD DVD camp.

Blu-ray has since retaliated with discounts on some of its players. Notably, Samsung's BDP-1400 has been sighted at under $300, down from its MSRP of $400. Now Sony follows suit with deep discounts to its BDP-S300.

I recently had a chance to sample Sony's BDP-S300.

My conclusion: Like all the early Blu-ray players, they're slow, quirky and frustrating.

The picture quality from Sony's Blu-ray player is an amazing example of 1080P at 24 fps. But the audio quality leaves much to be desired. The trouble with all first-generation Blu-ray players is not so much that the profile is only 1.0 but all the other little quirks.

Profile 1.1 only guarantees newer players will be capable of reading on-disc picture-in-picture features which is something the first generation (profile 1.0) players do without.

The most significant sacrifices on the early Blu-ray players are the new high-resolution audio formats, including Dolby Digital True HD and DTS HD. You won't get to hear those new audio formats until the new generation of players is released.

If you're absolutely sure you want a Blu-ray player, these are definitely best prices ever seen. But the home video industry is getting ready to make a significant shift in January.

Both LG and Samsung have announced high-end HD DVD / Blu-ray combo players. These will be a dramatic leap forward for both formats because the players will be full-spec HD DVD and Blu-ray players.

Full spec simply means the new combo players will be fully HD DVD and Blu-ray compatible unlike LG's current combo player, dubbed Super-Blu, model BH100. Super-Blu is a fully functional Blu-ray player but it's a severely limited HD DVD player. It can play back HD DVD movies but can't read HD DVD disc menus. You have to pick out special features and settings from the player's own menu system.

The new combo players are sure to be priced at around $800.

So, if you like the library of movies currently available on Blu-ray and are willing to take a risk that the format has no future, these pre-holiday price drops might have come at a perfect time for you.

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