I own one of these players and have used one for 3 months now. There are two models, the 370 and the 373. The 373 is the same as the 370 except it has a backlit remote control and is an exclusive model to john lewis and sony centres.
The first thing about this player that I noticed is how incredibly thin it is (36mm), astheticly it is nice although there is a bit of a bottom lip that sticks out, it look a bit odd but is not noticable when placed on a black glass stand. The front display is on the right and is the usual LCD type ( can be dimmed in the setup) Tray is located on the front right and is the thin flimsy type. there is two usb connections one on the front under the display and one on the rear.
The USB interfaces are capable of playing divx/xvid, MKV, mp3 and there is also a sony wireless N dongle for wireless internet connection, be warned however that this will cost a whopping £70. Blu ray java content is also stored on your usb drive as there is no internal flash memory for this purpose.
Boot up times are very fast, it will spin a bluray from cold in 3 seconds. This drops to 6 seconds if the "quick start" option is disabled however 6 seconds is still very quick in the market and apparantly uses less power in standby. It has gracenote disc recognition built in so that you can browse the disc artwork and check out the cast in the film, this slows it up by an extra few seconds if you decide to enable the feature.
Playback is solid and detailed. It produced a vibrant colour to my panasonic LCD using the XV colour 12 bit feature. Sound delivered to my onkyo amp via hdmi is spot on and it did well via optical too. DVDs were upscaled nicely although the edges of objects seemed a bit hard if im going to be picky. Not enough to bother me though and you can always turn the feature off if you want your television to do the upscaling instead. Missing from the 2010 range of sony blu rays is the option to display normal dvds in 24p format giving smoother panning. you used to be able to force this in the menu but the option is no longer there.
Playback from USB is without issues and there is even the option to stream content via DLNA from Computers and NAS drives should you own such treats. This works well although strangely the unit seems unable to render .MKV files via DLNA. Its divx or divxHD for networking. MP3s work fine, I dont use any other formats but can test if you let me know what file types you use. Before I move on I should point out that USB drives can only be formatted in FAT32 meaning the 4GB limit is there. Its not hard to split MKV into two files but is a bit of a spanner in the works and may put some off.
Photos work in dlna but mine seemed slow to load in the XMB media bar that sony uses for most of their gear these days so I dont really bother with that.
The unit works with sonys bravia TVs using the CEC control link that sony brand as "bravia sync" meaning bravia owners need not get the blu ray remote out of the box as their TV remote has full control. It works with the samsung and Panasonic versions of this technology too. I found that setting my panasonics lower VCR buttons to code 21 made these buttons work and the sony was visible in the viera link menu and worked like a charm.
There is plenty of internet streaming channels available too, the most useful being BBCiplayer, C5 on demand and lovefilm. HD streams nicely on 10meg> connections and c4od and itvplayer are due on soon via a firmware update.
THE GOOD
- Nice looks
- DLNA Client
- Regular firmware updates for new features
- good CD performance (also plays SACD)
- Fast to load bluray discs
- plenty of customisation if you want to play with all the settings
- its unnaturally cheap for such a feature packed unit
- works with other television brands HDMI-CEC control
- you can hear the disk spinning if you have a keen ear (there is also a small fan at the back)*
- not capable of 3D playback (there is a BDPS470 that is though)
- usb drives restricted to fat32, issue for MKV films
- you cant stream MKV over DLNA for some reason
- no ability to force dvds to 24p
In all I recommend this product. It can be found for about a hundred quid and at that price, with this quality and performance you will not be disappointed.
