Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony BDP-S350 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player

I recently purchased this Sony BDP S350 and connected it to a 42 in Toshiba LCD 1080p hi-def television,with an HDMI cable, with fabulous results. Blu-ray discs are nothing short of amazing, with clear, crisp, images, allowing you to feast your eyes on anything you watch. Standard DVDs are upscaled to near 1080p resolution, and I was very pleased and impressed with the results. I have owned this model for a week now, and have been playing it many hours, with no problems. Right out of the box, set-up was a snap. I connected this to a Yamaha 5.1 receiver via optical cable and I find the sound to be equally impressive. One day I will upgrade to an HDMI receiver, and I can only imagine how awesome that must sound. One thing to be informed of: I read an article in HDGURU.com that said that Sony plans on dropping the price of this model to $299 by the end of September, as it plans to release a newer model, the BDP S550, due out in October. What a bargain that will be! I would highy recommend this player.

Sony has really done it right this time, when making a blu-ray player that has everything you would want from blu-ray, including upgrading your regular dvd's.
To start with, the unit is very sleek and trim, and fits in easily with your television and various other boxes. This Sony BDP-S350 1080p blu-ray disc player loads faster than any other blu-ray player on the market right now.
The price is fantastic, especially with Amazon's sale price right now! The picture for blu-ray is truly out of this world- beautiful vivid colors, crystal clear and sharp beyond belief! As far as the picture goes for upgrading your regular dvd's, it is superior also. I have to say though, that I have an Oppo upgrading player, that is almost as good as this Sony. So, there are also just as good upgrading dvd players out there as well, but certainly non better than this Sony.
The set up was easy as well. I just plugged it in and attached a hi-speed HDMI cable to my 1080p lcd television, and after a fast set up menu, it was ready to go. I don't have separate speakers, so I did not have to set up other audio wires.
Another great feature is you can set this up directly to your computer for any upgrades in the future. Sony could not have made this any better compared to what has been available on the market to this date. This is a great value, on sale right now and the ABSOLUTE BEST picture by far! 5 Stars for Sony!

The Good:

Excellent picture quality, loaded with deep blacks and excellent contrast and color richness. Wonderful upscaling of normal DVD's too, the best I have seen, even better than the Oppo. (I have 3 Oppos) Blu-Ray quality is outstanding. Spin up times for discs is lighting fast, same as a normal DVD.

The Bad:

No slow motion. No frame advance. No clear forward or backward search feature. The picture skips in 4 second bursts or 8 second bursts and so on the faster you search forward, so it is agonizing to watch TV shows on this player and try to search through the commercials. Also if you want to see a scene over again or slow things down to understand what happened in a fast or complicated scene, forget it, this player has no such capability, it is just a "player only."

The Ugly:

The USB port that you are supposed to plug a micro drive into so you can take advantage of BD is so recessed into the back of the player and the opening so narrow that no micro drive I have found is narrow enough to fit into it. The only way to plug into the slot is to buy an additional "extra narrow" extender cable to plug into the slot, then you have to plug the micro drive into the extender cable. Pretty bad design flaw. Duh, Sony!

Conclusion:

If you want top notch Blu-ray quality with superior upscaling of normal DVD's and are willing to accept that all this player does is play discs, you can do nothing more, and if you are willing to accept that you will have to buy accessories to get a micro drive to work on this player so you can use the BD feature, then for the price, this player is impossible to beat. But if you want a full featured player that can let you have full control of your DVD's then you will need to look elsewhere, this is a "player only."

The BDP-S350 has much faster startup speeds and is smaller in size than past models. I've had it for a couple weeks and there have been no freezes, a problem I've had with other players.

One thing I don't like about it is that the TV display does not show what chapter the movie is in. It shows the title, but who cares about that? And the front panel display doesn't show the chapter either. It seems like some technician screwed up and thought the title is what people would want to see, instead of the chapter. It would also be nice to show, like most players do, the elapsed time within the chapter.

Also, the front panel display is very small, so if you are sitting ten feet away from the unit, forget about using it for information. Use the display button on the remote and see the info on the screen.

It doesn't do as well with upconversion of SD movies as my Toshiba HD-A20 player, so I will continue to use that one for SDs.

Does great with the big things, such as picture quality of BD discs, audio and reliability.

Some little things I like: (1) you are able to display on the screen the total time remaining of the movie - not all players do that on screen, (2) it remembers where you left off on all SD movies and some BD movies. With some BD movies though, once you hit stop you have to start all over again from the beginning, including all the copyright notices, etc. I'm not sure why that varies from BD disc to disc. (3) It has a handy dandy chapter search feature so you can go directly to whatever chapter you want, quickly.

There are all sorts of interesting additional features which I haven't fully exlpored yet, but will over time. All in all I'm happy with it - I just hope the do a firmware upgrade soon so it will be able to display chapter number and elapsed time within the chapter. But lack of that feature isn't a deal killer for me.

Sony gets it right -- at last!!! This Blu-ray player finally realizes the potential that was only hinted at in earlier models: it starts up quickly, loads DVDs like a standard DVD player, and does a much better job of loading blu-ray disks than anything but the Sony Playstation. Menus are simple to navigate and setup is easy. Since my Onkyo pre/pro decodes every codec out there (including DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD), I don't need or want a blu-ray player with 7.1 analog outputs or internal decoding capability. If you need these capabilities, I would opt for the higher-priced Sony BDP-S550 coming out soon at $200 more list. The Sony BDP-S350 will output DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD (as well as all the other audio codecs) over HDMI, so if you have a receiver or pre/pro that can handle all the codecs, you won't need the higher priced player.

The upscaling capability of any blu-ray player is important to anyone who has a substantial DVD collection and no plans to upgrade most of their movies to blu-ray copies (a major cost at today's prices). I use my Onkyo pre/pro to upscale the DVD movies I play in the Sony BDP-S350, but the player does a good job on its own in this regard. After watching several DVD movies using the upscale chip built into the Sony player, I was very impressed with its abilities to generate 1080p output from standard DVDs. While the Reon chip in the Onkyo pre/pro was a little sharper and had fewer artifacts, the Sony player held up quite well by comparison.

All the recent blu-ray players do a good job displaying 1080p images from blu-ray disks, and the Sony BDP-S350 excels in this area (as you would expect from the developers of blu-ray). Check out the professional on-line reviews for in-depth details on this player. I think that if you buy it, you won't be disappointed.