REVIEWS / BLU-RAY PLAYERS / SONY INDIA

Sony BDP S380 Blu-ray Player

05 Aug, 2011, 6:43 pm IST | by Aaron Almeida | Blu-ray Players

Blu-ray Players

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The remote control is small and sturdy

PRICE IN INDIA

8,990

TECH2 RATING

7.0

AVERAGE USER RATING

7.0

How we test

CONTACT

Sony India

 sonyindia.care@ap.sony.com

 1800 103 7799

 www.sony.co.in

Sony have been focusing hard on the Indian audience with their Blu-ray players and home theatre systems. We recently reviewed the BDV-E980 3D Blu-ray home theatre system and besides it performing well, it offered fairly good value for money. In this vein, Sony have launched the BDP S380 Blu-ray player which boasts of full HD 1080p playback and their new Bravia Internet Video streaming features. Read on to know more about the BDP S380 Blu-ray player.


Design and Build Quality
The Sony BDP S380 is a slim Blu-ray player unlike the one that came with the BDV-E980. The front panel has a glossy black finish, while the top has a matte black finish. The player has just four buttons - on/off, eject, play and stop functions. It has a single disk tray in the front on the left and at the bottom right is a USB port. The location of this port allows one to quickly swap USB enabled drives.

 

Just three buttons featured on this player

Just three buttons featured on this player

 


Connectivity options for this player are all located at the back. These include a LAN port which can be connected to an Ethernet cable for accessing Sony’s Bravia Internet Video and BD Live, an HDMI port and component and digital outputs.

The remote control of the player is small and compact and sturdy and the spacing of the buttons is done well. The buttons are mostly black but some function ones are coloured.

Features
The main feature of the Sony BDP S380 is the Sony Bravia Internet video. With the LAN port at the rear one can easily connect to this feature to browse loads of online content such as YouTube, BlipTV, Wired, Epicurious as well as Sony Entertainment TV. Out of the box one can access most of these Internet TV channels, however to use others, a software upgrade is required.

 


The interface on this player is XCross Media Bar (XMB). This is the same type found on the Sony PlayStation 3 as well as a range of Sony’s home theatre systems. The interface is easy to navigate through and one can access the various options like Network, Videos, Music, Photos and Settings by scrolling horizontally. In each menu, one can access the selection and choose the various Internet TV channels or drives by scrolling vertically. The user interface of this player is really good and one can understand how to use it within seconds.

A single HDMI connector on the player

A single HDMI connector on the player

 


The player apart from being Internet capable, allows users to use USB ports to connect storage drives and view videos, pictures or listen to music. The beauty of this player is that it supports both FAT32 as well as NTFS drives. This means that one can use their portable hard disk drive up to any capacity to run media. The player supports popular video formats such as MP4, AVI as well as MKV. Audio formats supported on this player are MP3 as well as WMA.

The addition of just a single HDMI port was a bit disappointing as it limits the possibility of connecting to an AV receiver and a display at the same time. However, if one needs to connect to an AV receiver to set up a home theatre system, one can use the HDMI option and use the analog connectors at the rear to set up the display. This is a bit cumbersome and would cause cluttering of cables.

Performance
The Sony BDP S380 Blu-ray player was paired with a Panasonic 65-inch 3D capable television to get optimum results from Blu-ray playback. We were definitely not disappointed. The playback was really smooth and the images displayed were crisp and sharp. Our How To Train Your Dragon and The Last Samurai Blu-rays both fared extremely well. Fast-paced action scenes rendered smoothly and colours and skin tones looked natural.

We ran videos of different formats using a 500GB NTFS drive and were able to playback files of formats such as MP4, AVI as well as MKV. The ability to play NTFS drives really impressed us as not many players have this ability. Most players can support just FAT32 drives such as flash drives and thumb drives. An issue we noticed was that some video files took a bit of time to load. However, once loaded, it performed well. While fast forwarding through the movies, no lag was noticed once play resumed. As for music files we were able to playback formats such as MP3 and WMA. These files played really well and no playback issues were noticed.

 

The remote control is small and sturdy

The remote control is small and sturdy

 


Sony Bravia Internet TV is the highlighted feature of this player and it is rightfully so. We played various channels such as YouTube, BlipTV, Epicurious, Sony TV and many others. All these channels worked perfectly. We were not able to access all channels and kept getting a message saying the player’s firmware had to be updated. Once the update was done all the Internet TV channels played well and no issues were noticed.

The remote control like the player performed well and there was no need to point it directly at the player for it to work. All in all, the BDP S380 did really well in terms of performance.

 

The slim Sony BDP S380 Blu-ray player

The slim Sony BDP S380 Blu-ray player

 


Verdict
The Sony BDP S380 sells at a maximum retail price of Rs. 8,990. This is a really good Blu-ray player by itself. Sony adding a LAN port and incorporating the Bravia Internet Video in it made this a great player. The only issues we had was that it had just a single HDMI connectivity option. Selling at a price of just under Rs. 9,000, the Sony BDP S380 becomes an ideal purchase for those looking to buy a standalone Blu-ray player as most players available nowadays sell for more.


Tags:

Sony BDP S380 , Blu-ray Players , Sony India , Sony BDP S380 Blu-ray Player , BDP S380 , Sony Bravia Internet TV , Internet TV , ony Bravia Internet Video , YouTube , BlipTV , Epicurious , Sony TV , HDMI , USB

Would you buy it?




 


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The Tech2 Labs receives many products every single week and each of them is tested with the utmost care and highest level of objectivity. There’s a constant effort to reduce and totally eliminate subjectivity. Each product is tested according to set test processes so the same test scenario is used.

Verdict
The ratings awarded to a product are derived from a number of tests and calculations, keeping certain important factors in mind. These factors consist of features, performance, quality and value for money. In case of software and some other categories, build quality might be replaced with ease of use or ease of installation. Products are compared with other products in a similar price range or product category.

Features
The features component of the score is rated based on the kind of features present on a particular product. Features are a big part of what people look for when they’re buying a new product such as a phone or a camera.

Performance
The performance score is derived from the benchmarks and tests run on the product. In case of the subjective scores, an average of the scores given by the group of reviewers is considered.

Build Quality
The build quality of a product is important so that it doesn’t fall apart after some use. The build quality scores from the way the product is designed and the kind of materials used in the product.

Value
Value for money comes from the fact that a cheap product is able to provide most of the performance of a higher priced product. Once again, value for money is judged by comparing pricing and performance of products in a particular price range or category. 

There are many other aspects of the product that are looked at such as the bundled software and accessories. All of these scores are aggregated together to form the final score.

What do the ratings mean?

Ratings are simple - higher the score, the better the product. A brief listing of the features and what they mean are given below.

1 - 3

The product is bad in almost every aspect. We strongly advise against purchasing this product.

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An average product that isn't the best you can buy, but isn't the worst either.

7 - 8

Product with this rating is highly recommended because it's priced sensibly, has a good set of features and performs well.

9 - 10

Exceptionally excellent product with features and performance unlike any we've seen in the past. A must-have for everyone!

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