Blu Ray Trouble

I recently purchased a Sony Standalone Blue Ray player ( didnt want the PS3 as already have the Wii) a few months back.


http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/home_av/others/0,39037618,43888805p,00.htm


I am facing the following problems with it :-


1) It takes atleast 2 to 3 minutes to start playing a Blu Ray Disc, is this normal ?


2) Yesterday, I bought Mamma Mia's Blu Ray disc and the movie was not working i.e. my Blue Ray would automatically shut down and then start all over again without playing the movie. Funnily, the extra features were working fine. Some time back I bought Top Gun's collector edition - the movie was working fine but the extra features were not working ( was able to return both these discs). Today, I tried playing another disc which is making the blu ray player go blank. In summary, out of 9 discs, 3 had issues. The other 6 are working fine and the picture quality is just unbelievable. Is this a software compatibility issue ? Am not sure if I have a lemon which I should be returning to Sony


Any inputs from other Blu Ray Owners will be greatly appreciated

Sounds like you've got a dodgy player. As it happens, I bought Mamma Mia on Blue Ray two days ago and we watched it last night on our PS3. No problems (other than a very poor out-takes selection). The PS3 does take a little while to load up the disks but not the 2/3 minutes you seem to be experiencing. Also, we've had no problems with any disks so far. Our picture quality seems good though I wouldn't say unbelievable. We did a test of Fifth Element DVD with upscaling vs Blue Ray and couldn't really tell the difference. The quality on the last James Bond film (one before QofS) was excellent though.

Thanks Dive Bum, I agree with the Mamma Mia's poor outtakes selection ( as I could watch the extra features) !


The good thing about this Sony Blu Ray player, apart from the picture quality on discs that do work, is DVD upscaling to 1080p. There is a marked difference and the picture quality is definitely sharper and the colours more vivid - never knew our DVDs could do that, ofcourse the TV also contributes (we use a Sony 46 '' X 300 A).


Anyways, I have been reading on the net that the model we have is a so called profile1.0 player which is not compatible with profile 1.1 discs ( e.g. ones with picture in picture capabilities). Am going to go check if my blu rays that didnt play had any of this.


Also as a last troubleshooting resort, we have called over the Sony service Team.


Thanks for your inputs.

Not wishing to make you feel worse...but I believe the PS3 is one of the few machines that keeps abreast of updates such as moves to profile 1.1 and 2.0. It is the only one(?) that allows you to download patches - not that I know how to do that... I also use it for photo storage and viewing (on my lovely Samsung 46") - much better than doing this on the computer. I hardly ever use it for games, which was why I bought in the first place and just used 'Blu Ray capability' as the excuse for my wife! I think our DVD upscaler (separate machine to the PS3) only goes up to 1080i and I can't say that I've been wowed by any difference in quality when replaying old DVDs - I'd probably need to see them side by side on different systems to be able to tell the difference.

hmmm, ...keeping fingers crossed and hope the Sony technician can give us a solution. If not, then maybe I should get Broadway to take this lemon back and give me a PS3 instead. I paid HKD 3,400 for the Blu Ray Player and I think a PS3 costs in the same range but dunno if Broadway will allow such an exchange ( am hoping they consider my past purchasing history!!)....Thats another problem in Hong Kong, the retailers are so rigid.

All Blu Ray disks have the disk menu written in "Java". Unfortunately, this is very resource hungry, and most stand alone players do not have enough memory to load these quickly. The PS/3 is actually the best blu ray player around. Until recently, the PS/3 is the only machine with the hardware to support blu ray version 2.0. I was shopping for a Blu Ray player 12 months ago, and conceded defeat, and bought a PS/3