My new Blu-ray player Sony BDP-S790

raj29shenoy

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Guys,

Even though I have not contributed to the on going Blu-ray discussions, I have been a silent spectator and closely watching all the threads. I thought it was time for me take the plunge and buy a good future proof Blu-ray player. I finally decided to buy the Sony BDP-S790 which is a 3D BD player with 4K capability. Even though I do not have a 3D TV yet, I still have a 40" LCD TV along with Onkyo HT (which is also future proof as it has 3D capability), slowly I will upgrade my TVbut it is a long term plan. :)

Currently I am in Germany, and Sony players are relatively cheaper here than in India. Players are Region B locked and so are some of the Blu Ray discs although many are ALL region discs. I thought this should not matter to me, as either I will buy the BDs in Germany or in India (as in India, all the discs are region ALL anyway). I have no plans of buying discs from US. There was a crazy sale going on many Blu-ray discs and were available at half price (7 to 8 Euros), :licklips: so I bought many which are Blu-ray worthy (I am of an opinion that unless a movie is shot with an HD camera, no matter what techniques they use, it can never be of a true Blu-ray quality. So it is not worth to buy upscaled Blu-ray versions), which means only recent movies make the cut. And since I dont want to spend unnecessarily, I decided to buy only those movies which are my absolute favorites among those Blu-ray worthy movies (Avatar, Tintin, Avengers, Skyfall, Inception, Inglorious Bastards etc). Plus there were HDMI cables available at throw away prices (3 Euros!), so bought three of them! :licklips:

Now about the Sony BDP-S790 Blu-ray Player: Initial impressions are quite mind boggling. Just two days into using it and I am absolutely loving it. I do not understand why this model is not available in India! Feels like we Indians are always treated with the older models (given that this model was released an year ago and still not in India! :annoyed: ). I paid around 135 Euros for it (approx. 11000 Rupees) on a sale which is quite a bargain considering the features it provides. (Whole week was spent on searching over the internet and whole Saturday was spent on searching this model and then buying from the cheapest store, I visited 10 stores which were spread around the complete city of Stuttgart! I started in the morning 9.30 AM; I tasted success only in the last store which I visited at 7PM in the evening! It was worth it :) ) :yahoo::yahoo:

It is a 3D player with 4K capability, Dual Core Processor, can convert 2D to 3D, upscale to 4K, play SACD, has in built wi-fi, two USB ports, DTS HD-MA and Dolby TruHD via HDMI, two HDMI output ports! It has Skype integrated (one has to plug in a webcam), USB keyboard is supported, built in web browser and may other apps like Netflix etc. It has a very premium look finish, looks great. Love its look. Simply outstanding features.

Video quality is great, plays YouTube videos to perfection (I could easily pair with the YouTube from my laptop and Smartphone), DLNA working very well, USB play is smooth, Blu-ray discs are read fast, BD-Live works great.

Sony has a good firmware support. When I plugged in the system for the first time, and connected to wi-fi, it immediately asked for a firmware update to the latest which I did. Also, from the forums I have learnt that Sony releases firmware updates for its models time to time which means they dont forget their customer base.

I could not verify the audio quality as I dont have a HT here in Germany. This feature I can test only in next year January once I am back in India. I could see that player can recognize all the audio formats without any issues (it shows the audio track info on the top, it showed all DTS HD-MA, Dolby Tru HD, 7.1, 6.1, 5.1, 2.0 etc along with the bitrates).

Also, as I said before, I will not be able to verify the 3D quality and 2D-3D conversion capability of the player as I do not have a 3D TV, same goes for 4K playability.

Small irritants: Even though Remote works very well and its buttons are placed well, the buttons themselves are a little bit of let down. They are not that smooth, one gets a tick-tock sound while pressing them which I didnt like and it makes them a little harder to press. Another complaint about the remote which I found in the internet was the lack of backlight support. So far I have not felt the need of it so can not comment about it. For BD-Live, I have to connect an external USB of 1GB or more, I thought this could have been in-built in an player which has so many features. Its a stupid cost cutting technique! Also, no cables were provided with the player, absolutely none other than the power cord! One more stupid cost cutting method! It has no DivX support. This is not actually a problem for me as all my videos are usually .mp4 or .mkv, but may be an important factor for people who want to play DivX. For some of the .mkv files which I played through USB, it did not show the subtitles properly, they were shifted to below the bottom position which meant I could see only the top most parts of the subtitles! It happened only for some of the .mkv files! Does anyone know solution to this problem?

Now some small questions from my side:
I learnt that the 3D TV could be Active or Passive. Does the BD player need to know this aspect? Can it run a 3D disc smoothly in both type of TVs? Is it mentioned anywhere in specs of the player or in BD discs?
Also, if someone can answer the subtitle shifting issue which I am facing, it will be well appreciated.

Thank you one and all for providing all the precious information and deciding to buy the best Blu-ray player for me. :clapping::thumbsup:

Also, request to other BDP-S790 owners to contribute to this thread with their experiences, we can make this as a thread for BDP-S790 as I don't see any other thread for the same...
 
Active and Passive 3Ds are two technologies used by the TV. It is independent of the BDP.

Did you try external subtitles like srt?
 
Congrats on your new purchase and welcome to the world of 3D.

I am in the market for a decent 3D BDP and have 2 queries regarding your player:

(1) Does it support External a hard disk with NTFS file partition or does it support only Fat 32?

(2) Does it play FLAC files?

Any firsthand experience on the above on your part witll be very helpful.
 
As you mentioned that no cable is provided except for power cord and you did buy 3 HDMI cables, is any one among them a 1.4v HDMI? cos that only supports 3D output. I think HDMI FORUM has finalized the 2.0v HDMI standards recently which supports 4K.So I you are not in a hurry for 3D,wait till 2.0v HDMI cables are commercially available. Else grab one in the on going sale where you bought the rest.
P.S:I do have a BDP-S490,but thought of buying a BDP-S790 too as I upgraded my TV. of course not a 4K TV. Zeroed on BDP-S790 as that's the only one with 4K support which is future proof, but to my disappointment its not available in India
 
Congrats on your purchase. I am sure that this player will serve you well.

I would like to disagree on your assessment that only films shot with HD camera can make it to the true BD standard. Film movie negatives can produce better resolution than even 4k. I base this statement on blu ray reviews on blu-ray.com where many older movies including those restored have scored great. Of course, if you wish to ignore them, that is your decision. :)
 
Active and Passive 3Ds are two technologies used by the TV. It is independent of the BDP.

Did you try external subtitles like srt?

I don't exactly remember, I will check tonight and reply. Thank you for resolving first question.

Congrats on your new purchase and welcome to the world of 3D.

I am in the market for a decent 3D BDP and have 2 queries regarding your player:

(1) Does it support External a hard disk with NTFS file partition or does it support only Fat 32?

(2) Does it play FLAC files?

Any firsthand experience on the above on your part witll be very helpful.

1. Yes it supports both NTFS ans FAT32. I tried the NTFS 1TB external HDD and 16GB FAT32 Pendrive, both worked fine.
2. I have not checked this yet. But in the spec it is no where mentioned about the FLAC. So it may not support. But anyway I will check and update you.

As you mentioned that no cable is provided except for power cord and you did buy 3 HDMI cables, is any one among them a 1.4v HDMI? cos that only supports 3D output. I think HDMI FORUM has finalized the 2.0v HDMI standards recently which supports 4K.So I you are not in a hurry for 3D,wait till 2.0v HDMI cables are commercially available. Else grab one in the on going sale where you bought the rest.
P.S:I do have a BDP-S490,but thought of buying a BDP-S790 too as I upgraded my TV. of course not a 4K TV. Zeroed on BDP-S790 as that's the only one with 4K support which is future proof, but to my disappointment its not available in India

The cable package just mentions it as High Speed HDMI cable, I even asked the salesman even he had no clue about the spec but he said the cable will work fine with my Blu-ray player. As of now I can not verify it, as I do not have a 3D TV, but it is working fine on a 1080p 2D TV.
Yes, I did hear about the new HDMI 2.0 format, but I am not sure how long it will take before it becomes commercially available as it depends upon the commercial success of the 4K TVs which are right now way out of reach.

Congrats on your purchase. I am sure that this player will serve you well.

I would like to disagree on your assessment that only films shot with HD camera can make it to the true BD standard. Film movie negatives can produce better resolution than even 4k. I base this statement on blu ray reviews on blu-ray.com where many older movies including those restored have scored great. Of course, if you wish to ignore them, that is your decision. :)

Well even though I made that statement, I gave into temptation and bought Terminator 2 BD (as its one of my absolute favourite movie). Played it yesterday and I felt the video quality of it not as good as the quality of Inception. Of course, the 32" LCD TV comes into the equation too.
To tell you the truth, it is my way of convincing myself that I should not spend unnecessarily on movies which I already own either in DVD or ripped format ;)
 
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If it is mentioned as High Speed hdmi cable then it is hdmi v1.4 compliant. One thing to remember is that these are only specs and any cable conforming to these specs will work. I recently tried a Rs.150/- cable bought from ebay and it does support 3D. It is not even mentioned as high speed hdmi cable.
 
Active and Passive 3Ds are two technologies used by the TV. It is independent of the BDP.

Did you try external subtitles like srt?

It seems the problem was with the subtitle language itself. That .mkv container has a subtitle of unknown language which even VLC player is not able to show (it shows it as boxes). So it was not the issue with the Blu-ray player

But now I discovered one more problem while solving this. If the subtitle is in a seperate .srt file, then the Blu-ray player does not recognize it! (Name of the .srt is same as the .mkv)
 
Congratulations on your purchase! I am sure you will keep finding new things with regards to the player to keep you interested for some time to come. Enjoy!!!
 
just add the SRT file to the mkv container using mkvmergegui and remove the unknown subtitle

Yes, that is an option. But I thought the feature was implicit. My Iomega media player can do it, LG LCD TV can do it...then why can't Sony player do it! I hope they will release a firmware update soon to fix this...
 
Yes, no Sony player can read external SRT files. Only if it is integrated in an MKV file, then only it plays. Anyway, MKVMERGE is a good and easy to use program to manage it.
 
I have two solutions for this. First one is as you suggested MKVMERGE. Second is that I will play that .mkv via my Iomega media player, so it is not major hindrance to me but it is always a good to have feature.
 
I did not have any FLAC files with me, so I downloaded a sample file from net and tried to play it. But as I guessed, the player did not recognize the file. So, the player does not play FLAC files.

Thank you for the update. Your effort is greatly appreciated.
 
The player is running smooth so far. Pretty happy with the purchase.

I have successfully streamed the video from my laptop to the player using XBMC and Serviio. But I am very much used to the VLC media player. Is there any way I can stream the videos via VLC rather than using XBMC or Serviio? Does anyone know how to do that?

My laptop has Windows XP OS.

Thanks.
 
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