Sony BDP-S760 Blu-ray Disc Player Review

David Mackenzie investigates Sony’s latest Blu-ray Disc player.

In amongst the sea of 3D TVs, one of the few genuine excitements I encountered at this year’s IFA show was, surprisingly, a Blu-ray player: Sony’s BDP-S760. I say “surprisingly” because playback from 1080p/24 Blu-ray Discs is of a consistently excellent standard amongst different players, so it goes without saying that Sony would have to be rocking the boat to make me anticipate a machine in such a way.

There are so many affordable BD players floating around this Christmas, and there isn’t a single one of them that I’d advise buyers to actually stay away from. For the most part, the Sony BDP-S760 produces 1080p video that, like all other players I’ve tested recently, is flawless in relation to the content stored on the disc. However, with more subtly problematic material, the player’s “Smoothing” feature (which is the single useful control from the “HD Reality Enhancer” suite) really does make a visible, albeit subtle, improvement to rough gradations in the picture, if any exist in the first place. This fact alone gives Sony’s machine an actual edge over the competition in the sea of otherwise very similar BD players. Other manufacturers haven’t, as of yet, come up with a similar feature to Sony’s (perhaps because they haven’t seen the need).

Due to the inclusion of this feature, which marks the first time I’ve seen a BD player make a visible, commendable improvement to picture quality without sacrificing quality in other areas, the BDP-S760 receives a “Reference” score for HD Video Quality. This score comes in spite of the fact that the BDP-S760 failed four out of the ten 1080i/60 film cadence tests, but I feel this is acceptable given that almost all BD content is either 1080p/24 or video-centric 1080i/60. In other words, this limitation will almost never be revealed in real world usage.

The S760 is also a very nice DVD player. Like many, it can occasionally be tripped up by 2-2 PAL Film material, but this is true even of some high end devices. In fact, much of the time, the S760′s PAL Film DVD playback is just about perfect (even although its scaling isn’t the cleanest around), something that can’t be said for Sony’s 4-figure BDP-S5000ES player. It also delivered perfect results on every single one of the film cadence tests on the NTSC (US/Japanese standard) HQV test disc, a fact that should be impressed upon owners of large Region 1 DVD collections (assuming they can find a multi-region version of the machine).

Users who already have a Blu-ray player shouldn’t rush out en masse to ditch their old machines in favour of a BDP-S760. Please remember that Blu-ray Disc is the best quality delivery format we have ever had in the home, and users should enjoy their player rather than convincing themselves that they can have a better one (because they often can’t). However, if you’re perhaps relegating an old player to a second room, or are looking for a BD player for the first time, then it comes highly recommended.

Read the full review at AVForums.com/Reviews