Sony BDP-S550

Sony BDP-S550

The Sony BDP-S550 is one of the latest and most technologically advanced Blu-ray players available from Sony. It includes a host of essential features and will provide exceptional quality video and audio to allow you to enjoy your Blu-ray content.

The Sony BDP-S550 features full HDMI support, which will ensure you the clearest picture and audio quality available. This single cable will connect the Sony BDP-S550 to your other media gear and allow a full HD experience as well as enabling other features on the player. The Sony BDP-S550 supports a wide variety of picture resolutions including 420p, 1080i and 1080p. It also supports the 1080p resolution in both 24fps and 60fps. The 24fps selection will allow you to enjoy your Blu-ray movies at the perfect frame rate. This is because most movies are captured at 24fps when they are made, and being able to play them at this frame rate will give you a cinema-like quality. Other players that cannot support this 24fps frame rate will have to convert them to another resolution and will reduce the picture quality. The Sony BDP-S550 will also play all of your older DVDs as well and will actually upscale them to 1080p for a better picture quality. This feature requires you to use the HDMI connection, and will actually provide a better picture quality than if you were playing it on a standard DVD player. Another benefit of using the HDMI connection on the Sony BDP-S550 blu-ray player is that it allows you to control other HDMI connected gear with a single remote. This feature is called Bravia Sync on the Sony S550 blu-ray player and will work with any HDMI CEC compatible equipment. This allows you to eliminate clutter and makes it easier to control your gear.

The Sony BDP-S550 blu-ray player also features a network connection that is used for several advanced features as well. By connecting the Sony BDP S550 blu-ray player to your high-speed home network, you can enjoy additional content from the internet for a particular movie. This feature called BD Live, works with a particular Blu-ray movie and will provide additional content that is not contained on the disc. This might include deleted scenes, bloopers, interviews, trailers for other movies or games. Each movie has different bonus content included but this provides a way to enjoy the movie long after the film has finished. This feature works in conjunction with the USB port on the Sony BDP-S550 that can be used for adding a memory stick to store this content.

The Sony BDP S550 blu-ray player also supports a feature called Bonus View. This feature allows you to open a second picture-in-picture window onscreen to view a second video stream from the Blu-ray disc. This is handy and can be used to watch the director's comments along with the film. The Sony BDP-S550 has an internal decoder for Dolby TrueHD and will decode this audio for you directly. This allows you to use a less expensive receiver for your home theater since the audio is already decoded. The Sony BDP-S550 also provides a 7.1 Channel audio output on the rear of the unit to make it easy to connect to a surround sound system directly. Considering all the features that Sony was able to include in the Sony BDP-S550, it represents a very good value for a reasonable price and should be high on your list of Blu-ray players.