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Product: Pioneer BDP-51FD Amazon Price: Too low to display Availability: In Stock |
Compare Prices on Pioneer BDP-51FD
Pros: I have owned 6 blu-ray players before this one from brands like Sony and LG, all great players, but this one right out of the box shines quality, Only player I have seen to upscale to 12 bit deep color, loads fast, responds to menus well, quiet operation, will pass all HD audio bit stream and decodes HD audio, some people complain when there is no backlight on the remote, its nice but I’m not a remote critic, if it does its job then good enough. Works seemless with the picture on a Pioneer Kuro plasma, a must have.
Cons: firmware came as 1.00, it won’t let me play The Matrix on Blu-Ray, but Pioneer responded the next day, they will send me the 1.08 update, so be prepared to update.
Other Thoughts: Movie makers keep messing around with the JAVA for NEW features, they need to settle down so our players don’t need an update every 3 months when a new movie comes out on disc.
I got this unit from Amazon at almost 1/3 off the MSRP; at that price I almost feel guilty. This is among the higher-quality BluRay players with regard to picture and audio quality. So far I’ve watched about a half dozen movies on it and I couldn’t possibly love it more. My A/V receiver predates HDMI, so I needed a player with multichannel audio outputs. This unit has high-quality Wolfson DACs that really produce outstanding sound.
Perhaps the most important thing to be said about this player (any current player, for that matter), is you must *update your firmware*! As of this writing the current firmware version is 1.17 (my unit arrived with version 1.02 installed) and it fixes a ton of bugs present in earlier versions. Current firmware and instructions for installation can be easily found on the Pioneer USA website with a little patience. Still missing currently is the ability of this unit to decode DTS Master Audio, but it is promised in an any-day-now firmware upgrade; there are few BluRay units that shipped with DTS MA decoding ability, so Pioneer isn’t particularly far behind any other manufacturer in this regard.
One thing to note is this player is a Profile 1.1 player and NOT a Profile 2.0 player, meaning it does not support BluRay Live content that is downloadable from the internet. Personally, I could not care less. There is very little BluRay Live content out there now that is worthwhile, and the BR Live processing and downloading is often mentioned as a performance drag on units that support it. Picture and audio quality are what mattered to me, and this unit delivers in spades.
EDIT 06/09/09: Editing to update info. As of 06/04/09, Firmware 1.32 does indeed enable in-player decoding of DTS Master Audio. It sounds outstanding!
The Pioneer BDP-51FD is one of the most well built Blu-ray players under $500 you will find in the market. And, with its latest v1.17 firmware virtually all of the bugs have been squashed plus DVD upconversion is now superior even to high end chipsets like Silicon Optix Reon. Pretty amazing what big strides this player has made in a short period of time.
The Wolfsen DACs provide outstanding analog audio and the many A/V tweaks such as the Source Direct feature will keep tweakheads happy for a long time to come.
While this player is not as user-friendly as some of the competition, once you’ve delved into all of its settings you will find that you can maximize A/V quality in a way not possible with other players.
Highly recommended for the moderately experienced (or expert) home theater enthusiast!! Nothing else in this pricerange comes close.