I was at Costco this last weekend and saw the Sony BDP-N460 Network Blu-ray Disc Player on sale for $199. It usually sells for $249, but most places have it on sale right now. As a side note, I wasn’t able to locate it on their website, but it was on an end-cap in one of their stores.
A while back, right after Blu-ray was initially introduced, I purchased the Best Buy “Insignia” brand Blu-ray player. I think I paid $250 for it. Back then, if you wanted network capabilities, you had to pay a premium, now this type of functionality is pretty standard.
The Insignia model that I owned was slow to start up. It took 30-45 seconds for it to power up before I could even insert a disc. You can’t upgrade the firmware on it, and there are no network capabilities.
That’s why the Sony was appealing. The BDP-N460 has full HD 1080p, Dolby True HD and DTS-MA audio decoding, BRAVIA Internet Video streaming, BD-Live 2.0 support, DVD playback and upscaling. It has built-in applications for Netflix, Amazon Video On-Demand, and Slacker, just to name a few.
I hooked it up to my system, plugged in a network cable and powered it up. It immediately determined that there was a firmware update available and within a couple minutes it had applied it and rebooted the player. That’s cool.
I also activated the Netflix application on the player. I was able to see my queue and I played three different movies over the weekend. It worked very slick. No glitches as far as I could tell. No skipping, very good video and sounds quality. I also tried Slacker, a free Internet radio service, which I had never heard of.
One other nicety of this product is that they include an HDMI cable in the box. Overall, I am very happy with the player. Historically, I have always had good luck with Sony components.