We finally bought a dedicated disc player for our living room. We've had an Xbox 360 for ever that I used to play Forza on and, though I don't play video games anymore, it has remained in our living room as our DVD player. It works okay as that, though there's much more of a UI than there really needs to be for a movie player, and you can hear its loud cooling fans in the unit and in the power transformer on constant drone.
So we bought a Sony BDPS3500 from Best Buy this afternoon on sale for 50 bucks. At the very least, that's about as cheap as you can get a Blu Ray player for, and this one has some streaming capability, too. Our TV is a Sony Bravia XBR40, and there's also some remote control sharing capability with this, so it works well from that regard.
I was particularly interested in the streaming, thinking that we could possibly move our Roku 3 to a different room. Sony's streaming interface is okay...I'd give it a 5/10. It's clean and efficient, but Roku's interface is far more inviting. Roku also offers the excellent unified search feature where you can type in the name of a show/movie/actor and it'll find what you're looking for, and present all viewing options (such as if it's on both Netflix and Hulu, for instance).
I'm not dissatisfied with the Sony BD player from the perspective of actually playing discs. That's its primary function for us, and it does that well. But as a streaming device, I find that it, like most devices that "also stream things", just doesn't live up to the Roku in terms of interface functionality and friendliness.
I'd have bought a BD player with a Roku chip in it in a heartbeat. Sort of like how there are some Roku-equipped televisions available now. A Roku-equipped disc player would have been perfect for us. They don't make one, though, and most Roku forums don't feel that's in Roku's future, in terms of market placement (as things move away from physical media to the cloud).
For movie-watching, this Sony works great. For streaming, Roku's still king.
So we bought a Sony BDPS3500 from Best Buy this afternoon on sale for 50 bucks. At the very least, that's about as cheap as you can get a Blu Ray player for, and this one has some streaming capability, too. Our TV is a Sony Bravia XBR40, and there's also some remote control sharing capability with this, so it works well from that regard.
I was particularly interested in the streaming, thinking that we could possibly move our Roku 3 to a different room. Sony's streaming interface is okay...I'd give it a 5/10. It's clean and efficient, but Roku's interface is far more inviting. Roku also offers the excellent unified search feature where you can type in the name of a show/movie/actor and it'll find what you're looking for, and present all viewing options (such as if it's on both Netflix and Hulu, for instance).
I'm not dissatisfied with the Sony BD player from the perspective of actually playing discs. That's its primary function for us, and it does that well. But as a streaming device, I find that it, like most devices that "also stream things", just doesn't live up to the Roku in terms of interface functionality and friendliness.
I'd have bought a BD player with a Roku chip in it in a heartbeat. Sort of like how there are some Roku-equipped televisions available now. A Roku-equipped disc player would have been perfect for us. They don't make one, though, and most Roku forums don't feel that's in Roku's future, in terms of market placement (as things move away from physical media to the cloud).
For movie-watching, this Sony works great. For streaming, Roku's still king.
