We finally made the jump to Blu-Ray recently, because we like movies in HD, and were very unsatisfied with the selection of movies on “Charter-on-Demand” (not to mention the price was a bit high too. I ended up choosing the Sony BDP-N460 because, as far as I can tell, it’s the only one that has BD-Live (pretty common now), Amazon Video on Demand, AND NetFlix HD Streaming. Granted, AVoD and Netflix are both not all that useful to us right now without Closed Captioning, but I’m hopeful that that feature gets added soon.

It doesn’t include wireless network connectivity, only wired. Rather than run another wire or add an expensive wireless router option, I just took advantage of the fact that the kids’ XP machine is close, and has both wireless and wired ethernet ports. Hooking it up as a bridge was pretty easy – the downside obviously being that the PC needs to be on for wireless to work. But I’m OK with that, because I think the majority of our viewing will be actual discs for now.

I have it hooked up in Component mode at 1080i. HDMI supports 1080p, but my current A/V receiver doesn’t, and my TV doesn’t support discrete device selection. I’m keeping my eye out for a good 7.1 A/V receiver with HDMI switching support.

So far, I like the device overall. I’d heard some bad things about start-up time, but I haven’t really noticed any issues with this so far. I have these gripes with the system:

1. The “Home” button on the Remote takes you to the DVD configuration screen, and pressing “return” does NOT take you back to the place where you were; instead, it takes you to the start of the disc. Who the heck at Sony thought that THAT was a good design?
2. The Blu-Ray DVD’s that I’ve watched thus far have the “unskippable” movie previews. I HATE this feature. A friend at work told me that Samsung players ignore that setting on discs, but Sony (being in the media & hardware businesses) does not. I’m hopeful that this doesn’t happen on other discs from other studios.
3. The “tray” on the device is hidden behind a large movable faceplate. While this LOOKS cool, I suspect that it’ll wear out prematurely.

I still wish that HD-DVD had won the format wars. But, hey, this is coming from the guy who still has a collection of Laser Discs!