The Official Sony BDP-S350 Owners Thread - Page 165

Thanks for the speedy response.

You have a witch on a broom flying around your Blu-ray player I think you really meant "which".

While the load times can be annoying, as well as going from one title to another (normally one episode of a TV show to the next when in play all mode), the lack of variable speed and still step is frakin' stupid. A mainstay of DVD players for years is totally missing from this player.

I never expected it to be missing and was pissed when I couldn't find how to access those features.

When I replace this player, which I eventually will, making sure all of the variable speed modes exists will be a must.

I consider 45 seconds painfully slow, and countless posts in these forums indicate I am not alone in this. Claiming it's because BR is 3rd generation versus DVD 11th is a ridiculous excuse. They are very similar technologies, so BR is built on top of those 11 generations of experience, not starting all over from nothing. At the very least, DVD set customer's expectations about performance, and it seems the BR manufacturers chose to ignore that, instead opting for things like Java-enabling (gawd, I loathe Java...) that brought performance to its knees.

I do agree that some features like overlaid menus are a nice addition, but that doesn't justify all that you give up.

There are folks that agree with you, and obviously folks who don't, since most of the better BD players completely sold out during the holiday selling season even in a crappy economy.

You are also comparing apples to oranges in saying that because DVD starts up very quickly that BD should work the same way only a few years after the very first players were demoed at CES.

DVD essentially is just booting up a "boot strap" that tells it how to read a disc and gives it the instructions it needs to do things like access menus.

BD is booting a very complicated Java environment that allows for advanced features, network connectivity, etc. It's simply not going to be as quick.

What would make BD players as "snappy" as DVD players are very high powered components. This is one of the reasons the PS3 is very quick and responsive.

The down side is that expensive fast parts add to the cost of units and can easily push them into price brackets consumers aren't willing to pay.

If you find that BD is too slow then wait it out, faster players will inevitably come, through no other reason than Moore's law which indicates we will see CPU speed double (at the same price point) about every 18 months.

You will find that many of us aren't willing to "wait it out" though when BD offers the best AV experience ever offered in the home.

Is there any way to configure the settings in the S350's setup so that upscaling it turned off. My projector has a Reon video scaler than does a better job for upscaling non-1080p material than what the S350's scaler can do. I know I can manually reset the output resolution to 480i for playing DVD's or to 1080i for any BDs that are recorded in that format, but I would think there should be setting to simply allow the disc's native recorded format to be output, thus bypassing the S350's video scaler.

That's more about marketing (or more specifically, the number of homes with high-def TVs in them now) than anything else.


A few years in computer time is an eternity, and the fact that BR players are just now becoming affordable (but with such poor performance) supports what I've said. BR is too complex for its own good.


That's exactly my point. It's too damned slow and too damned complex. Whether you like it or not, the standard was set by DVD.


Well, when the 350 first came out, it cost as much as a PS3 and didn't have all the bells and whistles of a video console. So, why should it be so much slower than the PS3? Where are the "high powered components" in the 350? Oh, right, the $400 350 is the "entry level" player (the 550 not even being available at the time I bought it.)


I wouldn't be here if I had "waited it out", now would I? As someone else on this thread noted, I spent $400 on a dog-slow BR player that doesn't provide the same navigational functionality as a $50 DVD player. From the looks of it, I will probably have to upgrade this player sooner than I would like because of that. Frankly, I am rather disappointed by the 350 and by Sony.

Anyway, enough ranting for one day.

OK, whatever. When the S350 premiered at $399 there were numerous blog entries and news reports that indicated the price was going to come down quickly. It seems evident that Sony was simply milking early adopters for the higher price, something pretty standard in the electronics industry.

If you got stung as an early adopter all I can say is that you knew what the performance was for the price you were paying and could have returned the player in the allowable window.

I payed $150 for my S350 and paid $150 for one I bought for my mom. At the price I paid I'm pretty satisfied with the performance.

The only way to do this would be to separately connect component video to your PJ and use that for SD-DVD material, since it will be output at 480p only.

The S350 does not offer the "source direct" feature that would play all content at its native resolution and let the PJ do the upconversion.

The Pioneer F51 does have this feature as does the soon to be out Oppo BD83.

Maybe I'm over reacting to the over reactors but so what if it takes 45 seconds to 1 minute to load. If 45 seconds is too long for you, you need to lighten up your schedule. Go poor a beer, get some snacks .... then sit down and enjoy.

My neighbor and I figured that the slow load times were due to there being more information on the BD vs. SD DVD, which loads much faster. I can wait, I am not that impatient.
Not having a linear fast forward bothers me more than load times.

Exactly. Put the darm disc in first. Of my gripes with this player and Blu ray. The load times is not even on the list. What about no resume play feature? What about the fact that the stupid remote can change the volume on a Sony amp?

Resume play works fine on some BD's. Not on others. Works fine w/ all SD DVD's (nice feature).

+1

What the heck, it's cheap, you put the disk in and watch the freakin' movie. It looks and sounds better than anything else you can enjoy at home. Loads too slow? Really? You're going to sit on your arss for 3 hours and you can't wait a few seconds while you're arranging your cushions?

I'll admit that BD Live is pretty lame so far, but that's not Sony's fault and otherwise this is a great player. I'm in no hurry to make any changes. It'll almost certainly be the last disk player of any kind I ever buy.

What about the fact that the stupid remote can change the volume on a Sony amp?[/quote]
I have the 350 connected via HDMI to a Sony DG910 receiver and the BR remote will control the volume of the receiver....

Also posted on the Sony S550 Owner's Thread - firmware for the S350 was issued today on the Sony site:

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu...350&SelectOS=7

That's the HDMI CEC. You can turn off that functionality in the menu of the BR player.

Nice, now I feel ok with going ahead on firmware! Thanks.

Has anybody updated the firmware thru the internet. I tried, but it tells me that it is "Already updated", and I still have ver 10.

I'm about to purchase this Blu-Ray player and was wondering if you guys are happy with the remote. My current player has the main buttons (play, pause, skip, FF) as BIG buttons towards the center of the remote. I notice that those buttons on the S350's remote are small and towrds the bottom (doesn't make sense to me). Does that bother you much? Thanks!

[I'm not planning on using the remote for any universal features][/size]

With the last firmware (#10) update the ethernet update followed the website update by 24-36 hours.

Some of these comments are amusing. "It doesn't load fast enough" "It's too slow". Question: What the hell do you hope to do with those "precious" extra seconds you gain with different players? I'm baffled as to why it's such a huge issue with some people.

OK, thanks for the response. I just got the player a couple of weeks ago, so this is my first update process. I didn't know about the day or two wait thru the internet.

These people surely have never used a Toshiba HD DVD Player because the 350 is alot faster then them. I dont think they know just how bad it realy could be. Im realy supprised sometimes how fast my 350 actually is with HD media. When I hit the eject button it only takes 17 sec for the tray to open (and thats with out using quick start) add another 20 sec at most (most BD I have used were only like 5-10 sec) for the BD disc to load and your watching your movie in no time.

Who's going to be the first brave soul to install it?

The commenters here all seem to be deriding the slowness issue, but that's only one aspect of it. I see it as part of a bigger picture, that compared to regular DVDs, BR is ridiculously large and complex. The bells and whistles (BD-Live!) have come to dominate at the expense of basic performance, cost, and reliability. It requires regular firmware updates (when's the last time your DVD player needed that?) just so it doesn't choke playing a friggin' movie. Want smooth slo-mo through a scene? Tough luck. Want it to remember where you last stopped playing a disk so that you can resume later? Too bad. Load a disk without going to make a sandwich? Sorry. Region free? SACD support? Fuggedaboutit. And all this for the low, low price of $400 (now slashed to $300!) for an entry level player. But hey, at least the disks are a bargain at $30 and up (for those titles that are actually available on BR).

And people wonder why BR is taking so long to go mainstream...

True that! I still occasionally use my Toshiba HD DVD player and the time it takes to open the tray I could bake a ham! Well, maybe not a ham, but I could microwave a mean hot pocket in that time! My 350 opens it tray in 5 seconds flat (guess I did the fast start thingy some time in the past), and after that I can wait the time it takes to load a movie by getting settled into my chair.

Same here. I just got done with the update without a problem.

I have the 350 connected via HDMI to a Sony DG910 receiver and the BR remote will control the volume of the receiver....[/quote]

I have an STRDG-920 connected via HDMI to my S350.

What do I have to change on the 350 to be able to adust the volume level of my 920 using the remote that came with the 350?

It sounds like you should just stick with your precious DVD preformance since there are too many issue with BluRay for you to enjoy it. Its your opinion that a few less seconds and other small issues are worth more to you then superior picture and sound quality, So you realy should just stop using it and quit whining to us about it.

Also its your own fault for buying it at $400, most of us here waited to pick up the 350 when it reached a price we were willing to pay for it. If you were a smarter shopper you could have picked it up for $200 or less as I and many others did. Another thing, "regular firmware updates" ??? There have only been 2 firmwares for this player and one of the two only came out today.

I have never payed $30 for any BluRay disc, This is another sign of not being a smart shopper.

Sorry if my opinions offend or upset you, you are free to ignore them. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been voiced before. My comments began, in fact, in response to another poster who was expressing the same complaints. And frankly, your snide comments really aren't contributing much to the conversation.

The $400 list price of the S350 isn't the issue (I actually paid around $350 if I recall); I am an early adopter with disposable income to buy toys like this. I had been waiting for months for an affordable BR player to come out, so when the 350 first arrived, I bought one (although compared to DVD players, $350 is hardly a bargain). I don't generally spend $30 on disks either, but there is a significant gap between the MSRP of DVD and BR disks.

Look, I want Blu-ray to succeed as much as anyone, but it is taking a very long time for it to take off. The release of titles on BR continues at a mere trickle, BR players are cheaper but still a long way from the $40 DVD player, and their basic functionality doesn't yet match that $40 DVD player in some respects. Certainly the PQ and SQ are outstanding, but there's more to making a product successful than that. As has been widely discussed elsewhere, BR has a relatively small window of opportunity to succeed, and the clock is ticking.