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>> Hi, I'm Matthew Maskoviak [assumed spelling], senior associate editor at CNET.com, and this is the Sony BVPN460. This is a stand alone Blue ray player that Sony released at the end of 2009 and it addresses a lot of the criticisms that we had of previous Sony Blue ray players. As you can see, the design is pretty standard. If you hit the eject button, the tray flips down and you'll see the disc tray comes right out. Other than that, it's a pretty simple Blue ray player and it looks like their entry level models. The big upgrade on the N460 is the sweep of streaming services. We were always harsh on Sony for not including Netflix; the N460 has Netflix along with Amazon video on demand, Pandora, Slacker, and a bunch of other streaming services. Now, these services are great but the big catch is that the N460 doesn't have built in Wi-Fi. That means if you're going to want to take advantage of Netflix, you're going to need to either plug in an Ethernet cord or use some Wi-Fi bridge to get internet to your player. A lot of people don't have Ethernet in their living rooms, so that's a big hurdle to step over. Another missing feature we would have liked to see is on-board memory. There's no on-board memory, so you're going to have to stick in a USB memory stick into the back of the device and Sony still has that weird recessed USB port, so if you have one of the larger USB drives, it's just not going to fit in the back. Overall, we did like the included remote, although it did have one of our pet peeves from a lot of 2009 Sony home theater products, in that it doesn't have a reject button on the remote. All that means is that you're going to have to bend over and wait for it to eject whenever you want to switch a disc, but it seems like an oversight when every other player has one. In terms of Blue ray quality, especially for the price, we were really impressed. We don't see a lot of difference between Blue ray players in terms of performance after a certain level, and this is in that upper level of video quality where there's pretty much no difference between the high end models of Samsung, LG, and Sony. DVD conversion was also good, sure it's not as good as say a player like the Apple BDP83, but unless you're really picky about DVD video quality, the N460 will work for you. [Inauible] BDP and 460 doesn't have a lot of the step up features that we like about the LGBD390, it is about 100 dollars less than those players, it has a lot of streaming services, and the video quality is really good. So it's a good mix between the budget value and the high end performance that we like, and we think it's going to work for a lot of consumers. I'm Matthew Maskoviak, senior associate editor for CNET.com and this is the Sony BDP and 460.
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