Sony BDP-S350

^M00:00:00 [ Music ] ^M00:00:02 >> Hi, I'm Mathew Moskoviciak, associate editor at cnet.com, and this is the Sony BDPS 350. Now this is a stand-alone Blu-Ray player from Sony. And what makes this product unique is that it's actually much smaller than most of the other Blu-Ray players we test. It's only a little bit larger than a standard Blu-Ray case in terms of depth. Now when you turn it on you'll notice that it has Sony's XMB graphical user interface, which is pretty nice. If you look on the front of the player underneath you'll see logos for things like Dolby True HD, which means it has on-board decoding for Dolby True HD, so you only need a receiver that's HTMI compliant to use it. You'll notice that it doesn't have DTS HD master audio. Now if you look at the spec sheet you'll notice that this is a profile 1.1 player, which means it can access bonus view features on some Blu-Ray discs. Now you'll notice that it's not a Blu-Ray 2.0 player, although Sony says advertisement going to update it with Firmwear update sometime in the future. That means that there are some discs that have Internet enabled features, and you won't be able to access those until the Firmware update. Now to do the profile 2.0 features you'll need to add USB storage to the device. And if you look around back there's a USB port labelled EXT. However, the USB port is recessed, so it's a little difficult to fit a standard USB stick in there. You'll need, like, an extra slim one. And we just had some standard ones that didn't fit in well at all. Now looking around back you'll notice the connectivity. There's an HTMI output, which is the main connection, and using that output you can get [Inaudible] video and 24 frames per second as well as high resolution audio. While this is one of the more impressive stand-alone players that we have seen, there is one other Blu-Ray player from Sony that is still a better value, and that is the PS 3. Most people are going to get a much bigger bang out of their buck with the Sony PlayStation 3, because it's also a high-def gaming system and it can stream media. I'm Matthew Moskoviciak from cnet.com, and this is the Sony BDPS 350. ^M00:02:05 [ Music ]