Hi just to share my experience on this product......
I brought this player for my uncle who recently upgraded his avr to marantz nr1504 to go along with his old pandam satellites+subwoofer. He was more inclined to bring a pioneer bluray player as he had a good experience with pioneer products for dvd playback.
I accompanied him for the purchase and did all the required comparisons to find the best bluray player. Compared all of the above players and found that is player is well built and offers decent set of features.
Got it for Rs. 10,500 from fairdeal electronics in mumbai :yahoo: with bill and warranty
Got the product, unboxed it and put it up and running. Went ahead with the setup. I then slipped in a bluray and the pq was fantastic. The disc loading time was also quick and faced no issues with it. Next i put in a hd-dvd which had good pq and faced no issues with this as well. Then it was time to check sd dvd(standard). I was shocked at the pq. The upscaler is of a very good quality and did a brilliant job at upscaling dvds. I played an audio cd and the sound was also quite good. It could not quite match the old pioneer dvd players cd playing capability, but in no way was it bad and was just a small notch below the old pioneer dvd player for cd playback.
Now comes the new updated features which pioneer has introduced which used to be found on the other smart players. This pioneer bdp-170 has wifi also which helps in video streaming from youtube. The player comes with two usb ports one at the front and the other at the rear. It can accept hdd upto 2tb. Not sure if it can support more than that. I connected my hdd and watched some movies which i had downloaded over the internet. It has no problems playing content at all. I played everything from basic mp3, flac, mkv with dts-hd ma, dolby true hd and it played it all. One thing which i found out is that this bluray player plays dvd discs from other regions too. I put in a region 2 disc and it read that. Cannot say how did it play. As when i went for an audition with the same disc an lg bluray player refused to play the same disc. Finally its network capability is a big plus and its a dlna certified product. I played some flacs and mp3 over the network and it played all wirelessly. No issues with that as well. Also this player comes with miracast. Used it with my xiaomi redmi 1s and it seemed to work quite well.
Coming to the decoding part.....it can decode most formats like dts-hd....true hd, etc. I set it to bitstream and left decoding to the avr. Would say that using youtube is a pain with the supplied remote. I quickly downloaded the android app and it works like a charm. However i use my tab to send videos straight to to bluray player using the send to tv function of youtube.
This bluray player is a very good one and its very well worth the price paid. The only con for me is that when i play audio cd's the display on the bluray player does not show the track no being played which i feel should have been there. Must say that pioneer has really improved the smart features which they offered previously. Hope this small experience helps.
