The Official Sony BDP-S350 Owners Thread - Page 106

Is it K-mart or Sears that is having this Black Friday sale? I thought I read Sears somewhere...

Thanks!

I just looked and they both have the same deal. It appears that Sears is an early bird special (5am-noon Friday) while the K-mart one is not (and is available Thursday-Saturday).

FWIW, K-Mart and Sears are the same company.

Okay Gents, I promise Im not this dumb when it comes to my tech. I do have a question I think you can help me with. I currently have a Westy 37W3 I use for HD viewing. I have a HD-DVD player I use for regular DVDs and a few HD-DVDs I bought. If I boughtthis player and hooked it up thru HDMI would it blow the HDDVD player out of the water? Or should I just get a better TV. I saw this hooked up to a Sony pushing 1080P and 120 refresh, it looked outstanding. Thanks for your time.

I doubt you would see any difference. Tests early this year indicated no picture quality difference between HD DVD and Blu-ray. I also think your TV is a limiting factor due to its size and 720p resolution. I have a 52" 720p and the difference between HD DVD and standard DVD is barely noticeable.

My Panny Plasma has 1 HDMI input. I have a DishNetwork HD DVR (722) and the Sony S350 BluRay. I want to use both with HDMI.
Does anyone use the Oppo HM31 HDMI switch with the Sony and does it work ok?
I read it works with the DN DVR.
But i also read threads that some switches don't work with some components. Just curious before I go buy it.
Thx

Is there a way to check and make sure the x.v.color option is operating correctly?

Thanks in advance.

Quick question. Is it possible to disable bd live in the player's settings if i just want to watch movies? I really dont care about all the bells and whistles nor do i want to buy a flash memory card. Thanks in advance.

If you do nothing to enable or connect BD Live then there is nothing to worry about. It's just not there.

BD-Live can effectively be disabled by not attaching an Ethernet cable.

The only thing you'll miss out on is the automatic checking and downloading of firmware updates.

thanks for the responses. i dont have an internet connection nearby so i will just check sonys web site for firmware updates. i plan on getting my player in the next week or so. i cant wait.....

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=2224
So how do I use the multi-region hack code with my Pronto RU950? Only put the code under a button and shoot it away to the player? Hope this works with my S550..?

A lot of folks swear by the Monoprice switch. I didn't know about that one and instead got a 4-to-1 switch from Xtrememac, and it works great with my Panny plasma. Never a single issue. It was about $70 if you look around. It's HDMI 1.3 compliant and if you look, you might find reviews by others with systems like your's.
http://www.xtrememac.com/xtremehd/switcher/index.php
My only complaint is that - like all the "active" switches - it must be powered to allow a signal to pass and does not default to one of the inputs when first turned on. That reduces the WAF.

Without going through this entire thread how does the blue color match up next to black components?

Maybe I'm color blind, but I hardly see any blue tint to my unit. Certainly nothing nearly as blue as the picture in the 1st post of this thread.

I have all black AV components. Looks fine to me. It's not a real "snappy" blue.

Unless it's under bright lighting, you can't even tell. In my system it sits atop a flat black center speaker, just under a grey-black bezeled Panny plasma. It's not noticeable and looks fine. Even the blue disk indicator light can be dimmed.

Even under bright lighting I don't think it would be an unpleasant look. The faceplate IS blue (the case is black), but definitely not "light" or "bright". It's not in front of me but I think it's clear blue plastic over a black background. So it's sort of just a hint of blue.

I can't tell either. I as worried about it like you...

Glad it worked!

Side Note: Finally got throught to level 2 support and it seems that I am not the only person calling about 'Kung Fu Panda' not working as I was told that the level 2 techs were testing the disc/machine combo as I was calling and hope to call be back with an answer... --David

Is it possible to easily setup the S350 to just pass 480p when playing DVDs? I'd like to try using my receiver (which has Faroudja/DCDi) to do the upconversion to 1080p. Of course when playing blu-rays I want 1080p(/24) output. In reading the manual I didn't see an obvious way to accomplish this.

you can do this but each time you switch from dvd to blu ray you have to go in the the video menu and adjust the resolution output. The previous s300 did have source direct so it would automatically select 480p with dvd's and 1080p/24 from blu rays. I am not sure why Sony left this out of the S350.
Basically it will not be simple it will be a pain to switch them back and forth.

Also keep in mind the 'forte' of the Faroudja chipset is de-interlacing, not necessarily scaling. By feeding a 480p signal from the S350 you are effectively only using the receiver to scale, and it is very likely that the TV or S350 will offer improved scaling. You will need to set the S350 to output 480i (DVD's are encoded 480i not 480p) to compare results, and as mentioned above, this will need to be selected manually each time.

Sony's pictures are not an accurate representation of what color the player actually is. I'm pretty sure the blue is exaggerated to emphasize the fact it is a Blu-ray Disc player. In reality the blue tint is so dark that it looks black in most light.

If your receiver can also upconvert component inputs, one option would be to run hdmi for 1080p and component for 480p simultaneously. This is the default output of the S350 when playing DVDs. Then to watch a DVD simply pick the component input on your receiver, and to watch bluray, pick hdmi.

Actually I don't believe this will work. You would have to set the HDMI to output 1080i since if you set it to 1080p the component outputs will be shut off.

I faced the same dilemma and let me offer you my solution- I use my S350 stictly for Blu-ray viewing and an old Philips non progressive scan (ie 480i) DVD player (circa 2001) for DVD playback. I have a Pioneer VSX-01 and it's Faroudja chip seems to deinterlace better than both my Sony player and Samsung LN46A650. At first, I was unimpressed with the performance but I had a few settings wrong in my receiver. Once I got that all figured out I found that sending 480i to a good chip for deinterlacing is more important that upscaling as many have mentioned and I've discovered. My Samsung TV upscales as well as the VSX01 so I didn't notice a difference between sending either 480p or 1080p to the TV. End result: a satisfied tech junkie. I settled on sending 1080/60p via HDMI to my TV from the Pioneer for DVD playback just because it looks more impressive from my TV's source signal info box

PS- if your TV has really good upscaling and independant settings per input(for maximum tweakability), you could even use the following technique for max results- 480i from DVD player to receiver via component -> 480p from receiver to TV via component. I found this works too if you have an extra set of YCC cables hanging around.

I agree. Though he could choose 1080i from the Sony and let his receiver deinterlacing everything. This would be advantageous for 1080i concert discs as well as all DVD media but not for Blu-ray movies as I wouldn't recommend becausing you are interlacing the native 1080/24p for movies just to be deinterlaced again in the receiver. I guess that's why Source Direct would be so useful so we wouldn't have even worry about this crap!

Yep, you're right. So the best you could do with this solution is simultaneous 1080i hdmi and 480i component.