Home > Consumer Reviews > Pioneer Elite BDP-05FD - Blu-Ray disc player - upscaling

I have been holding out on purchasing a blue ray until after the format war was settled between blue ray and the Toshiba HD DVD. Now that I have it, I'm not sure what I did without one! This thing is awesome!

So you probably realize that the blue ray format is great before you read this... So, let me tell you why I picked this unit.

1. start up. This until starts up very quickly. In fact I couldn't believe how long it took other brands to boot. Boot time is not a problem with this one.

2. Upconverting. I took a regular Lord of the Rings DVD into the local retailer and tested the upconversions. It is my opinion that this Pioneer had the best upconversion in the store.

It's not a cheap player, but if you have a lot of regular DVD's, you'll appreciate paying the extra bucks to be able to watch instead of replacing your entire collection. What I found though is that newer DVD releases still convert and look better than older releases. I watched one of my oldest DVD's last night, Pulp Fiction, and I must admit that it didn't look as good on this setup as it did on my old set up.

For reference, I have this player hooked up to a Pioneer KURO PRO-111FD. It's a great combination.

AMAZING picture quality! fast load times and no lag. The MAIN reason I love this player is the firmware updates are MAC COMPATIBLE! I had to throw out my Sony because their firmware updates were only PC. That made it useless after about three months (wouldn't play ANY Blue Rays) Not to mention the fact that I could cook dinner before the damn thing powered up and started playing. The Pioneer is worth every penny. You will not regret this purchase.

I almost purchased this Blu-ray player today. I, however, decided to wait and check with the local Pioneer dealer first from whom I purchased my Kuro Pro-151FD. The local dealer informed me that Pioneer discontinued this model already because of some problem with the firmware that actually requires the end-user to ship out the player back to Pioneer for repair or hardware rework, depending on how you want to look at it. That may not be a big deal to you if you don't mind parting with your player for a few weeks, but it turned me off. The local dealer also commented that he had to RMA all of its remaining 05FD players back to Pioneer and that the replacement is the BDP-23FD.

The Pioneer website does not seem to have any information on this, but perhaps you may want to check around with your local Pioneer dealer before purchasing this box. That is, if the hassle of parting with your hardware is not important to you.

I don't really care at this time for BD-Live. For one thing, I already spent a great deal of time watching the movie itself and don't care for the Internet features that BD-Live offers. That is why the BDP-05FD seemed ideal. It concentrated on better audio features for one thing. Now I am back to figuring what I should get. Perhaps I will wait for the BDP-09D to come down in price. The BDP-23FD seems comparable. Maybe I will look into it some more.

Great player recommend it to everyone, it boots up a little faster then my Sony 300 picture quality is great. I have always loved pioneer product and have nothing to bad to say about this Fantastic player.

This blu ray is so quite, the picure quality& sound is superb, it goes great with the SC07 pioneer elite av receiver, get it you wont regreat it , angelo