Scored an S300!
My crappy $80 LG upscaling DVD player finally ate its last
DVD two nights ago. Like me, it had developed a taste for
sharp, cheddar cheese. In this case, I think the DVD du
jour was
Juwanna Man, a true classic of Western cinema.
Ahem.
The LG player was the non-drawer type (NEVER buy a
player which uses roller feeds instead of a drawer!), so I
had to disassemble the darn thing to retrieve the DVD.
I wasn't too upset about the failure. Much as I bad-talk
the LG, it had served its purpose by allowing me to watch
movies via HDMI output on my 50-inch Panny plasma
until Blue-Ray became affordable.
BestBuy had an open-box S300 for $450, so I jumped.
Brian,
The Sony S300 does an excellent job with upscaling...
Oh. My. Gawd. I have no BD disks yet, but the plain old DVD
upscaling from this player is itself worth $400. The LG and
plasma combo looked so much better than my old TV that
I had no idea how poorly it was upscaling. How did I live
with that player for so long?
The detail, color, black levels, and contrast of the S300 are
superb. Switching from the LG to the S300 was like putting
on my glasses in the morning. I swear that I now see an
entire magnitude of greater detail such as individual blades
of grass and the sheen on hair.
Best of all, the annoying "clay effect" color-blending errors
are now totally gone. The worst example of this problem
was at the opening of "Shrek 1". A sunbeam slowly fades
in to highlight a fairy tale book. With the LG player, the
sunbeam and book were literally unidentifiable. They just
looked like olive drab color-blobs on a black field until the
book was opened and the pages reflected more light. Even
at the very lowest light levels at the start of the fade-in,
the S300 shows the sunbeam dust-sparkles and the book
details. That LG was practically broken compared to the
S300. But what do you expect for $80?
I can't imagine what a good BD will look like. This player
pretty much eliminated any desire to restock my movie
library with the new BD media. The list of films which I'd
rebuy at $20 and up is very short: LOTR, Narnia, Kill Bill,
the Potters, and the recent Pixars. Maybe a few others, but
certainly not
Hitch or
Purple Rain. Why not release
Ernest Goes to Camp and
Dorf on Golf on Blue-Ray?
I mean, they're re-mastered! Whoo!
Anyway, I must now decide on my first BD title. This is
a momentous decision! My first DVD was
Blazing Saddles,
but I have no plans to buy that on BD unless it's practically
free.
There are no BD titles available right now which really
"blows my skirt up", so I will probably wait for
The Incredibles
to be released. Besides being one of my all-time favorite
movies, I can't wait to see the jungle scenes from Nomanisan
Island in true BD format for comparison to the upscaled
DVD format.
Oh, who am I kidding?
Hellboy is out on BD and I love
that movie too. That film's dark look and FX should make
for an ideal comparison between upscaled DVD and true
high-rez Blue-Ray. I just hope it's a decent transfer.
But I can't complain, the S300 is doing everything I had hoped it would. It's one of those things where it exceeded my expectations.
