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I have owned the player for six months, but have only been able to use it for 10-12 hours. I'm approaching fifty, so I am no novice. Most of the time, it just presents an unbearable obstacle. I have owned lots of Sony products in my life, but this player is the nadir of my experiences with ALL brands of electronics. Its controls are not even responsive to normal commands: even powering up the unit is difficult. This model is boat anchor material. Beware.
When I bought a Sony BDP-S301, I enjoyed it enough to buy another for my other TV. The problem has gotten so bad, I haven't been able to get either to work properly for an entire movie for several months. At first, both worked fine, though a little slow to start up or accept an eject command. After awhile, both started either rebooting while loading or freezing up part-way through a movie. I've upgraded the firmware through several releases to try to resolve the problem, always without success. Don't waste your money on this one.
Very slow loading too. Bought mine in May and have had nothing but problems. The majority of discs won't play the first time. Have had to return many discs back to NetFlix, even after updating the firmware. I recommend you buy something else.
Even after the update, the loading times are slow, the machine is temperatmental, and nearly every disc I rent has at least one glitch in it where it skips sound and/or part of a frame. I had this less than a year before I had to download a firmware update to my computer, burn it on to a DVD and then load into the machine to update it.
Once you are playing a Blu-Ray Disc, of course the picture is fantastic on your hi-def Monitor, but this has been a very temperamental piece of gear. I purchased this in February 2008.
You have to remove it, power back down, power up, reload, wait for the excrutiatingly long load time, then, maybe it will work. Very, very slow load times.
Sometimes if you leave a disc in and power down, it will not load properly when you power up. Prior to this update, the machine would not play many newer discs, although it was hit or miss as to which ones.
I would recommend waiting a bit longer to make a Blu-Ray player purchase, or pay more money for a better machine.
The load times are not quite as lengthy as some would have you believe. It will NOT display PIP material on newer Blu-rays. It will properly display 24p material and 60i material for 1080i source material. That means that some of the newer discs are going to require a firmware update in order to play them. Some of the criticisms of the player are largely the result of the apparent ignorance of the reviewers.
The player is a 1.0 player. It does an adequate job displaying BD Java material (again provided that the firmware is up-to-date).The BDP-S301 cannot compete with the features of the newest players. It has always worked quite well. It does take around a minute for the machine to boot up.
It will play PCM audio (which is uncompressed). Most of the people I know that are interested in HD content don't really care about these feature anyway. Some of the problems that other reviewers are describing sound very much like firmware conflicts. But come on, a minute. It's a first generation player (Profile 1.0).
I got this player about a year ago as a Christmas present. It will not play Dolby True HD. It also will only output 1080p through the HDMI output and not the component (720p/1080i max). It will NOT display online BD Live material. Here's the player in a nutshell. If you can find a comparable 1.1 profile player or even 2.0 for a decent price, get it. The player does not advertise True HD audio, so you can know that before you buy it.
However, if you find a good deal on this one (as the prices on these soon-to-be discontinued models is bound to drop dramatically as we enter the holiday season) and you are only interested in watching the movie in pristine HD detail with very solid audio, buy this one. What does that say about our society when we are complaining about having to wait an entire minute before we can watch a two hour movie. It's a solid player that very rarely has any problems (provided that you keep the firmware up-to-date). But it wasn't designed to. I've been very happy with it.
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