Sony BDP-S570B 3D Blu-ray Player

This is a brilliant product. I bought this as a Christmas present for my dad, who is very much into his gadgets and new technology. The Blu-Ray functionality was the first and foremost reason to buy this but also the TV on demand was a key reason. Sony Bravia's Internet Video service is fantastic and at present has the most key services out of any TV on demand service apart from Virgin Media's TV (IF YOU CAN GET IT IN YOUR STREET) BBC iPlayer and Five on demand work very wel. The option of using wireless routing (at no extra cost on this model, which makes me wonder why you would get the lower model if you want wireless connectivity), is very good and works just as well as my PS3 wireless connection. The BLU RAY output quality on a Panasonic Viera TX P42S20B is outstanding. Vivid colours good depth to the picture and crisp high quailty resolution on Avatar and Alice in wonderland. The sound is of a good standard outletted on digital out to the surround sound system but does not do full HDMI 1.4 audio out without upgrading the amp, this is very good if you have a 1.4 surround system but i don't see why it couldn't have had DTS on optical out as well??? Maybe i'm reaching with this and people more techy than me could say otherwise but overall it doesn't affect your viewing experience and listening experience. TV on demand is a great addition and with ITV player and 4OD in the pipeline it really does wipe the floor with any other ondemand video offering without having a PC/MAC in your living room. Great product Sony outstanding interface with the XrossMedia Bar and a real treat for my dad at Christmas. Amazon's delivery schedule was excellent as well considering the time of year came within a week at the busiest time of the year well done!

I've had this player now for about 48 hours. I like it a lot, its a vast improvement over the Sony S300 which was my old one. The best feature is the start up time which is a few seconds, the S300 took more than a minute. The machine is responsive - no more waiting for ages for a response after pushing a button in the remote. The blu-ray output is simply lovely; I think it may be even sharper than the S300 - which was also very good. The icing on the cake is the internet player features. There is BBC iplayer and the channel 5 one along with some sports channels, a Sony one and a Lovefilm one. To access these, you need to link the machine to your broadband network. It was a pretty painless process to set up for wireless internet; it took me about 2 minutes. The internet players then just work, the BBC even does HD. There was one small niggle, when I tried to link my Lovefilm subscription to the blu-ray player via the Sony account (less complex than it sounds), the Sony website fell over. The website Sony have set up to handle product registration and things like Lovefilm activation is not the best. It's ugly, very basic and it crashed several times as I was trying to register the player and link the Lovefilm account. The site has the look and feel of something that has been cobbled together at short notice and it spoiled an otherwise painless setup experience. I can't comment on the 3D output because I'm still saving up my pennies for a 3D TV. The only other niggle I have with the machine (and its minor) is the size of the power plug. You can't unplug the power lead from the player, and the plug was too large to fit through the hole in the back of my TV unit. So I had to cut off the plug, pass the cable through the hole and rewire a new plug. I know its trivial, but all the other plugs for the TV, DVD and home cinema went through that hole. By the way, there is no earth wire in the player's power lead. In summary, love the player, love the output quality, love the iplayer HD and the Lovefilm streaming. Happy with this purchase and I'd recommend it to anyone.

One of the best aspects of this Sony, is its ability to use Internet TV services. So far I've used iPlayer & Demand Five, with BBC HD content being supported too. There's also LOVEFiLM, Dailymotion, YouTube (HD not supported) and a host of other services. The interface for the video services is very snappy, and it only takes a few seconds to buffer the video on my 10Mb connection. I'm using an Apple N Router for my wireless network, and have had no problem with stuttering video over Wi-Fi. For DLNA streaming, Windows Media Player 12 was used to set-up the media on my PC. I've been able to play most of my mkv files (one file played with no sound), along with divx & mp4 content. The DLNA streaming was fairly simple to setup, but I needed to let my Norton firewall "trust" the Sony player before it showed up on my PC. So far, I've successfully streamed 720P content over Wi-Fi with no issues. The only negative with the BDP-S570, is that it's slightly noisy when playing Blu-ray discs. The noise is at at its worse when the drive is in seek mode (usually when skipping through the pre-movie trailers). It settles down when the main feature gets going, but there is still a little bit of noise. It's something to be aware of, but it doesn't deserve a star knocking off for this small flaw. Overall, it's a very good Blu-Ray player. In use, it dug up more detail from my Blu-rays then my old LG BD370, and has more display settings (like noise reduction) that you can tweak. I haven't tried its 3D abilities yet, but this future-proofs it to a degree. One last good thing about the Sony, is that it's very quick to start-up, and this can be improved further with its quick start mode. It deserves 5/5 stars.

I bought this a couple of weeks ago to replace a Sharp Aquos model that had recently thrown in the towel. Really impressive player: picture quality is excellent - I've got it connected up to a Sony STR-DH810 receiver (also from Amazon) and a Bravia 40" TV I bought a couple of years ago. Matching kit means fewer remotes :-) Given that the Sharp I had didn't do much (other than *eventually* play a film), this has been an eye-opener. BBC iPlayer, LoveFilm, YouTube... (there are more) are all nice little gizmos that add value to an already well-priced piece of hardware. For the price, it's hard to beat - particularly if you're after a certain brand to match in with what you already have. The only *slight* downside to this player is that - whilst it's advertised as .mp4 .mkv etc compatible, these formats will only work from a USB stick (or, I assume USB hard drive) rather than from a network source, so streaming to it from a PC requires some other approach (I'm about to test iSedora for this). If it did this out of the box, it'd be perfect as I'm currently streaming via the XBOX 360, and that's a little behind the times for this. Anyway, if you're in need of a good player, this is an excellent option.

I am very disappointed in this machine. Why? Quite simply, it does not have a 5.1 analogue output. The whole point in buying an up-market Blue Ray player is to enjoy an enhanced picture and the sound to match. This machine produces a brilliant image, upscaled for DVD, and the wireless internet access is a brilliant advantage (although even that is limited to BBC I-Player and 5 On Demand - no ITV or Channel 4). I'm sure the 3D facility is just as good, but I can't comment on this. However, if you want to enjoy 5.1 surround sound you will have to purchase a dedicated AV receiver with speakers (£300 plus) or go for the Logitech system which has an optical input (about £230). There appears to be no such thing as an optical to 5.1 phono converter (stereo yes!). I naively thought I could use a relatively cheap (but still good quality) 5.1 active speaker system (around £70), but no, that was wishful thinking. My cheap Lidl DVD player (£29) has 5.1 analogue phono outputs so why not this expensive Sony machine? My only recourse is to buy an additional, cheap, Blue Ray player which has the analogue outputs just to enjoy surround sound or quite simply put up with the stereo sound produced by this Sony machine. I'm not prepared to spend hundreds of pounds extra. As I say, I am disappointed and probably wouldn't have bought this if I had realised it's shortcomings.

Perfectly happy with the picture and sounds quality on both BD and DVD. The fast load time is excellent. Internet access to iPlayer is very good. Lots of other channels but the content is either of low interest or requires a subscription. Streaming is a big disappointment. It picks up my servers but plays very little. Spent lots of time trying to find the problem but in the end, turns out to be the small print. There are severe restrictions on file type and size that it will play over the network and USB. Network is very restricted - no MKVs for example. USB less so, but format must be FAT32 so file size must be less than 4GB. There are fewer limits if you burn to disk but that kind of defeats the object. My biggest concern is mechanical noise. I recently watched a film at night when the house was quiet and at low volume. The noise from the stepper motor was clearly audible above the soundtrack from the sofa 4 metres away. I have done some research and mechanical noise does seem to be a problem, many reporting loud whining noises as the disks spin. Fortunately I don't get that, but I do get this clicking noise, rather like what a hard disk makes, and if I have the volume low it is clearly audible. In a dilemma whether to return it. Sounds like there is a possibility of ending up with a worse example. Will have to think about it.

I bought this to replace a Sharp profile 1 Blu Ray player that was slow to boot up, took ages to load movies, did not like some discs (saying they were incompatible) and often stuttered and stopped during movies. Firmware updates over two years were few and far between and it annoyed me so much I decided to buy the Sony. So far the Sony has been everything I expected living up to its excellent reviews. It starts up from cold in about ten seconds, It loads Blu Ray Avatar in under 30secs (compared with the Sharpe's 9 minutes!) and most Blu Ray movies as quick as a DVD player. Its built in wifi connected to my secure router easily and it streams BBC iplayer well. Some other internet services available on it seem of dubious value to me but may appeal to some. All this and 3d capability as well should I ever decide to get a 3D TV. It detects firmware updates automatically and installed an update from Sony immediately it first connected. Movie images are just amazing (much much better than cinema quality)and sound is great and it plays music cd to a high standard through my Yamaha surround sound system. A great buy and Amazon was the cheapest and in stock. Update Jan 2011. Now bought a Samsung 3D TV (PS50C680G5). This TV automatically detects the Sony Blu Ray and I can access internet tv via the Sony with the Samsung remote. The Blu Ray player is getting noisy and this is most noticible when loading discs but you can hear it buzzing in quiet moments during movie playback.

I wanted a blu-ray player for the living room, already having a PS3 hooked up in another room, and what really swayed it for me to choose this one was the internet connectivity, this makes it much more than a mere blu-ray player by opening up a whole host of internet-based video channels and video streaming options. Providing you have a strong wi-fi signal or can route an ethernet cable to it, internet / network set up is easy (and relatively secure thanks to WPA encryption), though here is where one of my niggles comes in... if only Sony had provided an external wi-fi aerial socket, or something like an aerial wire, I'm sure the wi-fi pickup would be much improved; I know from experience that metal blocks wi-fi like there's no tomorrow, and as this unit is mostly metal I'm sure much of the wi-fi signal strength will be lost (I don't actually know where the wi-fi receiver is, I hope it's behind the plastic front panel and not the metal casing). The default list of online video channels is impressive, there will be many hours to keep someone busy here, kinda like the days of analogue satellite with all of those weird foreign channels! Admittedly most of them are probably American so some channels are not as useful or relevant in Britain as others. BBC iPlayer is here, as is Five on Demand, but there's no 4OD (Channel 4 On Demand) or the ITV Player, hopefully these will be added in a future update (which is easy to perform via the internet connection). One thing to be aware of is that internet-based content (especially items generated by the public, e.g. YouTube) will vary tremendously in quality, one clip could be very high quality where as another could be compressed to high heaven and be all blocky, it has to be said that the Sony player does a very nice job of cleaning these up as best it can for presentation on an HD TV. Another thing to remember is that HD content will sap your broadband bandwidth something chronic, and it probably won't be full HD anyway as they will have to compress it otherwise the average broadband connection would just take too long to stream the content (video is buffered, but the buffer in the unit is finite so if the broadband speed is not high enough then the video will keep pausing as the buffer is filled back up). Streaming video playback is also dependant on the server it's coming from, sometimes if that server is busy then the video may pause or fail to load. The options during internet video streaming are impressive too - YouTube videos can be played back with the description or full-screen, with the ability to zoom in and out of any streaming video, videos can be added to a favourites list, navigation is easy, getting back to the main menu is accomplished with one press of a large blue Home button on the remote. My major niggle is the way it plays video, whether it be streaming from a local network device or a blu-ray - when a video is first played it seems to miss the first couple of seconds of sound, it does this when skipping to a different chapter on a blu-ray or DVD, or when playing a video via a network media player device (such as my ReadyNAS), hopefully this too will be addressed in a future update. It's not a killer, just an annoyance as if the chapter is played back from the beginning it plays correctly with sound right from the start, it's quite odd and something I can only put down to being a software error. Apart from the minor sound glitch, blu-ray playback is great as one should expect from a Sony product, certainly no complains there. Can't comment on the sound quality as I don't have a dedicated sound system worthy of blu-ray output, just the pathetic built-in speakers of the LCD TV, but there seems to be plenty of options. As far as general DVD / blu-ray and media streaming go I think my PS3 still trumps this device, but the PS3 is a much more sophisticated piece of entertainment hardware so this should be no real surprise, although the PS3 makes more noise - the Sony player is virtually silent in operation. I have not experienced the 3D part of this player as I don't have a 3D TV, and am unlikely to in the near future. This was never a draw for me in this product, but it will be good if I get a 3D TV in the future as I'm sure this 3D fad will last a few years yet. All in all an excellent addition to the modern entertainment set up, I feel that we are a little way off perfection yet though so far as blurring the line between internet and Freeview based TV.

produit parfait, reçu rapidement. le tout selon les promesses.

While everything else about this player has been quite nice, I bought it explicitly to play US disks ... which it does not :(