Watching Movies

One of the main problems with this unit is that it takes ages to turn on, even after the first time. With us it took 38 seconds just to show up something on the screen and 50 seconds to show the message “no disc”, allowing you to insert a disc to be played.

Another thing we didn’t like is the fact that the play button isn’t recognized as a valid key to confirm whatever is selected on the disc menu. We wanted to insert a disc and then press the “play” key on the player frontal panel to select “play movie” from the disc menu, for example, to start watching our movie right away. Since on the player itself there is no “enter” key, you need to use the remote control “enter” key to do this selection. If your remote control batteries are dead, you won’t be able to select anything on the disc menu. We also think that the “play” key is a much more intuitive option to play a movie than “enter”. To make things even more complicated to the non-high-tech user is that the “enter” key has no label saying that it is the “enter” key. One must assume that the key in the middle of the four directional arrow keys is the “enter” key.

When a movie is playing, the player response is somewhat slow to commands like previous/next chapter and scan backwards/forward.

We first played a DVD to see if the unit would play them correctly and also to evaluate the quality of the embedded upscaler (more about this on next page). The main problem is that we got the same problem that happened on Samsung BD-P1400: our movie was played inside a black frame, making our movie to be played inside a window (see Figure 5), not filling the entire screen. We are not talking about the traditional widescreen horizontal black bars, but both horizontal and vertical black bars. But contrary to Samsung BD-P1400 we could fix this problem, as will explain.

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Figure 5: With the default player configuration DVD movies are played inside a black frame.

This problem is caused when a movie is in widescreen format but the disc is sending a message to the player saying that the movie should be played on 4:3 aspect ratio instead of 16:9. This player has an option to fix this, available by pressing System Menu on the remote control and then selecting Setup, Video Setup, 4:3 Video Out and then choosing “Full” instead of “Normal”. After changing this the player could play any DVD correctly, filling the whole screen, as you can see on Figure 6.

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Figure 6: Problem corrected but with aspect ratio problem.

The problem here, however, is that the movie became disproportioned. If you compare Figures 5 and 6 you can clearly see that our female character became fatter after the problem was supposedly corrected. This happened because the player wasn’t able to recognize the aspect ratio of the movie, since the movie was saying to the player that it was a 4:3 movie, not a 16:9 one. Basically, the movie was a 1.77:1 widescreen movie while the player was guessing it was a 1.85:1 movie, as you can see by the addition of the black bands on the top and on the bottom of the screen. The solution was to use our TV zoom function that, by the way, is actually designed to solve this very particular issue. After we pressed the “ratio” button on our TV remote control to select “zoom1” ratio, the movie was playing like it was supposed to be playing. See Figure 7 how our movie is now filling up the entire screen and our female character is thin again.

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Figure 7: Problem 100% corrected.

We had no problem playing Blu-Ray discs but the already mentioned slow response to commands. The video and audio quality was high-end, as it supposed to be.

Some users report some slowness to load the main menu from the latest Blu-Ray discs, because they use several fancy features. Since we only played somewhat old movies, we cannot comment on that.

On newer Blu-Ray discs you may face problems, though. The menu from some discs like Pirates of the Caribbean and Happy Feet were written using a Java version higher than the version the player is shipped with. The solution is a firmware upgrade. This upgrade must be done downloading a CD image from Sony’s website, burning this image to a CD or DVD and then loading the disc into the player. We tried it out and the upgrade process delays a lot, like 15 minutes.

We have two comments about this procedure, though. First, like we mentioned, this unit does not have an Ethernet port like Samsung BD-P1400, so you really need go to the CD burning process (you can call Sony and ask them to ship the CD for you though; they will do this free of charge).

But what we though really counter-intuitive was how you check which firmware version your player is using. You need to press System Menu on the remote control and then go to Setup, Video Setup, TV Type, press “Enter” and then press the blue button. We think an option called “System Information” or similar on the menu like other units have would make much more sense.

Another problem we ran into was with the region coding of this unit. We tried all tricks on the book to unlock this unit and make it region free with no success. Since we have a huge DVD collection with movies we bought in different countries, having a player that isn’t capable of playing them is huge problem for us.

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