Review Sony BDP-S3100

[MatthewB]

Okay so this week I bought this wifi enabled bluray player (my first stand alone besides my PS3). The cost of 99.00 was to good a deal to pass up. I've been adding more and more movies to the cloud and the Vudu app on this player was my main reason for purchase. I was not prepared by how many apps this player comes preloaded with. It also has "Crackle" a free movie service along with three other free movie service providers. There are four or five music apps (pandora for example). This player also lets you sync your iOS or android systems. Sony has a very cool remote app now loaded on my iPad. Not only is it a remote but you put in your zip code and it lists all your cable and sat providers and in my case Directv it then lets you choose up to 50 favorite channels and will give you an up to date program guide on your device. Granted you won't get sat service on your player but the quick channel guide is way nicer than my DVR guide.

I actually spent about three hours playing with apps before I even tested the PQ/AQ of the Bluray player. I'm a Sony fan and this player actually replaced my never ever used Sony BDP-350 which is about 5 years old. I'm putting in storage till my PS3 player dies and I have a back up player with component outputs for my older non HDMI Pioneer RPTV.

Since nobody makes players with component outs anymore best to be proactive.

I will say this new player has a unique design. It's top has what best can be described as "facets" with a slight pyramid shape to the top. I also wasn't prepared for how small this player is. It has about the same width and depth as my iPad and is only about an inch high. This model is the middle player while the 80.00 BDP-1100 has no wifi and the top model the BDP-5100 is 3D and has a front dot matrix display the 1100 and 3100 do not which is okay with me.

Sony is still using the popular PS3 crossbar onscreen display to setup and choose various apps. I was almost ready to buy a Roku3 to get Vudu in my bedroom but this player not only does everything the Roku does ( no Angry Birds game though) for the same price it comes with a Bluray player. Now I will say the AQ is the same as all other players but the PQ is slightly improved over my older BDP-350 with way faster turn on and load times.

The wifi signal is very strong on this player with most times my devices register about 7-8Mbps this player gave me a strong 10Mbps ( I pay for 12). Online reviews say this is a step down from the Oppo player but only slightly as reviewed by those who own both. Granted paying 500.00 for a player for a bedroom system that will get very little Bluray use is a no brainier for me. I'll pay the 100.00 for the slightly stepped down PQ. This player only has three connections in back LAN connection, HDMI and coaxial ( no optical ) audio connection. I understand last years models had dual HDMI outputs one for audio/video and one for audio only. This years model just the single HDMI 1.4 connection.

If you hanker for the front display and 3D abilities the 5100 is 130.00 but if neither is any concern than the 3100 does everything else that the 5100 does. This is a very nice "bedroom" type player that can easily be used on the main system. Small and sleek player still undecided on the faceted top though but since nothing is going on top it shouldnt be an issue. The remote is a smaller remote than the typical elongated Sony PS3 size remotes I like the free Sony remote app much better. Btw didn't even need to update my bedroom Harmony remote as my older 350 commands worked with the 3100.

So in conclusion with all the free apps, Bluray player and remote app on my iOS this was a great buy. One caveat though is you have to register your device online to take advantage of some (not all) of the apps and the Android and iOS device must be synced with the player and that also requires entering a code shown on your display but its pretty much all done automatically and was very easy to do in fact I have yet to crack open the manual. There are people who have reported "freezing" with movie apps but Sony recommends shutting off 24fps function and that has cleared up all freezing issues. Guess the extra transcoding of streaming movies to 24fps has issues. I never use that feature in any of my players so shutting it off wasnt an issue. I tested a few minutes of Crackle and Vudu and even broadcasting HD I had no issues.


Photos added by Zing

 

[Flint]

Since I cut cable in June I have been using my Tivo to watch Netflix. I have been looking at streaming devices to get Netflix, Hulu Plus and other services but realized this Sony player does everything those things do PLUS it is a BluRay player. As such, I am considering getting one. Let me know what you think of it after a few weeks.

 

[MatthewB]

Will do Flint. So far so good.

 

[Haywood]

If your streaming is limited to the "majors" such as Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon, Crackle and Vudu, these Blu-Ray players rock the house. If you want any of the more specialized services like Drama Fever or some of the content from things like PBS Kids, the Roku 3 is the way to go. I also give the Roku the edge for local content, although most of these Blu-Ray players now support DLNA.

I have a PS3, a Windows 8 Media Center PC and a Roku 2 XS in my living room, so I've done a lot of experimenting with the pros and cons of each from an interface and functionality point of view. The Media Center PC rocks the house as a DVR and has a really slick interface for dealing with local content, but is essentially useless for streaming. The Roku is by far the most versatile streamer and is also excellent at handling local content, but has no television functionality whatsoever. The PS3 does not have as slick an interface as either of the other two, but it works well for local content, can tune into live TV via my HDHomeRun's DLNA feed and can also play back live TV recordings (no transcoding required). What it cannot do is pause live TV or schedule recordings and it has no convenient way to skip commercials in recorded programming (you have to FF).

The box that intrigues me the most is the next generation Ceton Echo Media Center Extender. It is going to be Android based, will support the full gamut of Media Center Extender functionality (meaning full DVR) and will also offer a wide range of Android-based streaming apps. That might be the holy grail, but it isn't out yet and may yet fail to hit the mark.

 

[Deleted member 133]

I own three Sony Blu-ray players.

I bought the last one (BDP-S5100) off Amazon for $118 delivered to Bat's place in time for his last GTG. It's currently listed at $120 on the Sony.com site and $115 on Amazon.

Besides the two differences between the S3100 and the S5100 that Matt mentions in his review (front panel display and 3D) there are two other features that the S5100 has, which may or may not be important to some people: an extra USB input (on rear) and SACD (including outputting DSD over HDMI). To me the latter is worth the extra $15 alone.

Performance-wise the S5100 is almost certainly the same as the S3100: both will properly pass their ones and zeros over HDMI. In other words the picture and sound is as good as it gets. The streaming abilities (and types of files handled) are superb.

I do however have some big concerns with Sony's firmware in the S5100 - which I assume is replicated in the S3100. (The same problems are found in my older S390.) I have been in contact with Sony support and have provided detailed suggestions for improvements which they have told me have been passed on to their tech folks. However as of yesterday, when I updated the S5100's firmware, the issues remain.

The two big issues (for me) are...

Unlike much older Sony Blu-ray players (one of which is my third player) there is no way to defeat the auto-off power saver mode. So if you don't touch anything and have left your player alone it will shut off after 30 minutes. This is important because...

Accessing a large number of music folders via Wi-Fi takes a very long time (Matt, you know how many folders I have!) and it can sometimes take 15 minutes of me tending the remote to access them all. If I then leave the player for 30 minutes I have to start again. There's more to it than this - but I won't go into it here. However, as I said, I've provided very detailed suggested changes to Sony. Personally I will not buy another Sony player until the changes have been implemented - it's simply too damn frustrating otherwise.

Others may not find this to be such a problem - depending on their own usage / style.

Jeff

 

[MatthewB]

Jeff will this work with just the USB connected device or if I stream Pandora will it shut off after 30 minutes? I'm mostly gonna use my Appletv for music streaming and thanks for reminding me that SACD is only available on the 5100.

I should mention that people have had issues with freezing up of streaming media not only because of the 24/p feature but Sony also says to shut off "Deep Color" from Auto to Off. I'm unaware of any device that uses Deep Color so don't know why Sony continues to implement this. I've read alot of customer reviews and one of the highlights of this device is everyone is in agreement that Netflix looks a lot better than using the PS3 and Appletv. Gonna do a side by side later and test this. The other bonus is this player will pass HD audio via streaming Netflix and youtube which I guess was never available before. This was reported by several owners but nothing has been confirmed by Dolby on this so gonna have to test this one out to.

Jeff the front USB does it have enough power to drive a portable hard drive or am I stuck using a standard flash drive?

 

[Towen7]

Why the silly shape? Does your BD player have to make a fashion statement?

 

[Deleted member 133]

Jeff will this work with just the USB connected device or if I stream Pandora will it shut off after 30 minutes? I'm mostly gonna use my Appletv for music streaming and thanks for reminding me that SACD is only available on the 5100.

I should mention that people have had issues with freezing up of streaming media not only because of the 24/p feature but Sony also says to shut off "Deep Color" from Auto to Off. I'm unaware of any device that uses Deep Color so don't know why Sony continues to implement this. I've read alot of customer reviews and one of the highlights of this device is everyone is in agreement that Netflix looks a lot better than using the PS3 and Appletv. Gonna do a side by side later and test this. The other bonus is this player will pass HD audio via streaming Netflix which I guess was never available before. This was reported by several owners but nothing has been confirmed by Dolby on this so gonna have to test this one out to.

Jeff the front USB does it have enough power to drive a portable hard drive or am I stuck using a standard flash drive?

Matt

I have not had any problems while either streaming hour-long video off my server, or streaming a Netflix movie. By "leaving the player" I mean having it just sit there doing nothing. So if I stream an album that's fine. But let's say I then walk away from the player when the album ends. If I come back more than 30 minutes later the player has shut itself off. I then have to spend 15 minutes reloading the music folders in order to pick one out (assuming I want to select from all of them). By reloading I mean having to actually keep scrolling down using the remote - because it will only keep loading for 10-15 seconds and then it stops. So as the artists / group folders are accessed from A to Z, I get part way through the A's and then it stops importing folder names. That's fine if all I want to listen to is ABBA. But ZZ Top? Gotta load them all in. One of my proposals to Sony Tech was that as you select sub-folders, that all of that subfolder's contents keep loading on their own. Another issue is that once I get them all scrolled-in, there is no way to direct access any alphabetically. Basically you have to scroll through them to get where you want to be. And that can take a few minutes. Why can't I hit the "5" key once to start at the j's? Or the "6" key twice to start at "n"? Just some of the many suggestions I made to take this from user hostile to user friendly.

I have plugged an external USB-powered hard drive into the front USB port of my S5100. Worked like a charm. (I did this to avoid having to stream those music files I spoke of above - to quickly play a particular album for a guest. But given that this is more than a little silly since this is a "streaming" player... refer to comments above!)

Jeff

 

[Deleted member 133]

Why the silly shape? Does your BD player have to make a fashion statement?

Actually the darn things are so tiny that they pretty much disappear / are not noticeable. Probably more so with Matt's S3100 since it has no front panel display.

 

[MatthewB]

Jeff I recall reading that the player is limited to 500 titles after that it shuts off. So people have to create many 500 limit sub folders. As your collection is so large you mave to create sub folders like A-C, D-F and so on.

Thanks for the info on the hard drive. I have tons of movies on my hard drive.

 

[MatthewB]

Well did some testing tonight and can confirm that on Netflix the PQ is a step up from my Appletv along with better AQ. I am a fan of the show scrubs and I like the episode "My Overkill" where the lead singer of Men at Work sings Overkill at the beginning. Now when compared to my Appletv playing the image always appeared soft to me. I blamed it on being a 4:3 presented image and never thought much about it. On the Sony player it was like a veil was lifted the image was very sharp and clear. The other thing I noticed is when Colin Hays is strumming his guitar the sound isn't as muffled as is on my Appletv. I was really hoping that the Appletv would outperform the Sony on Netflix as I hoped it would give me a reason to use the Appletv more than the Bluray player. But sadly I gotta give props to Sony for on Netflix the picture and sound is clearly better.

Now onto YouTube I can confirm that on HD videos rumors are true they are now being played as 7.1 Multi Channel in and not Dolby Digital 5.1 as my Appletv plays them. Watching the new Ironman 3 trailer and new Thor trailer and the sound is enveloping my 7.1 system in my bedroom. Awesome and just fantastic PQ as compared to my Appletv.

Now there is a valid reason for this. My Appletv can only output 720p while my Sony can be output as 1080p into my DVDO edge than the Edge outputs 720p to my plasma. I know scaling this way is wierd but in 1080p mode the image is far sharper than just 720p to the edge and 720p (with DVDO enhancements) to my plasma. So wether the Bluray or the DVDO the image is better on using the Sony......way better.

Now the bad. I tried to hook up my portable Goflex portable hard drive and the player recognized the hard drive but couldn't locate any of the movie or music files just kept getting that small circle (searching) going round and round. After twenty minutes I tried my iPod with about 400 songs again couldn't read it but still listed the Goflex as the device instead of iPod. Turned off player and turned back on still says Goflex so this time plugged in flash drive with about 300 songs all Mp3 format again it couldn't see any of the songs. Just kept searching. Not sure if user error or player.

Update okay when you plug in a device to USB you would think it would just locate files and play but no. You have to select "Options" on the remote ( my Sony App in my case ) then select "Start Play" and it immediately played my Mp3's on my flash drive. Strange that you have to go through that but figured it out.

Also found my files on my Goflex by also hitting "Options" than "Select Files" (wait a couple seconds) than either My Music (which has all the music Jeff gave me on it) or Movies to select movies. Now here's the wierd part all my "torrented" movies are copied in "AVI" format which the Sony would play but my legally bought Digital copies that come with Blurays are saved in MP4 format and those wouldn't play at all. It gave me Audio not supported warning and the movie would play in snapshot format where it would give you a still image than a second later another still image from the movie but ten minutes further into the movie and so on. So guess legally digital copies won't work but pirated movies work great. Strange.

 

[Deleted member 133]

The Sony should support every A/V format - including .mp4 - without any problems. I've not got any to try but if I were you I'd contact Sony support. They're actually pretty good at getting back to you pretty fast.

With my slightly older player, I once had to do a global reset to get it to stop recognizing an older server, and to access a newer one instead. That only took a couple of minutes.

As for numbers of folders... it actually has no problem finally recognizing literally hundreds of folders at the same level. It's only that it won't auto-scroll them all in when I select the "My Music" folder off my server. As I said, it runs for 10-15 seconds then stops. With remote in hand I have to keep manually scrolling down. The weird thing is that my oldest Sony BD player, which only supports photo streaming, will actually do exactly what I want the new one to do: when I select "My Music" from the server it will keep auto scrolling and load all the folders, from A to Z. Of course it won't recognize any of the music files in those folders but up until that point, that's how the new ones should behave.

But for what I consider a handful of pretty simple firmware updates (especially since my oldest player's firmware behaves so well with respect to my two biggest beefs with the new ones), these new Sony BD players would get my highest recommendation. As I said, I won't ever buy one again until they correct what are, to me, some very user-hostile limitations.

Jeff

 

[Deleted member 133]

Here's what I originally sent to Sony. Perhaps a better explanation than my previous posts:




I own three Sony blu-ray players and would like to offer some suggestions for upgrades to the last two units' firmware to deal with some very frustrating problems that I have encountered.

My three players are:
BDP-S560 - bought new in August 2009
BDP-S390 - bought new July 2012
BDP-S5100 - bought new June 2013.

The oldest player, the S560 has one very important feature that absolutely needs to be included in the latter two: defeatable "Auto Power Off" (as it is called in the S560) / "Auto Standby Mode" (as it's called in the other two.) For reasons that I'll get to later, not being able to choose between having this "feature" on or off on the S390 and S5100 really lowers the user friendliness of those two units. This is a simple firmware change and should be made.

You know that these players offer progressively better "streaming" capabilities, and streaming is why I bought the latter two. However both players cause no end of frustration when trying to stream music from my server. I'll explain.

I have a huge amount of music, filed by artist then album folders. When I access the "My Music" folder on my server, those two players properly open it and import the next layer of folders (alphabetically by artist/band). However both of them only import on their own for 10-20 seconds and then stop. I have to "mind" the player by continuously scrolling down through the folder list to ensure that the player keeps retrieving folders without quitting. In my case that can take a good ten minutes. The firmware should be changed so that all I need do is select the My Music folder and then go do something else while the player loads all the sub-folders from A to Z.

One of the problems with the Auto Power Off (or auto standby mode as it is called) with these two players is that, after spending all that time to pull up all of the folders, if I don't then give it my attention within 30 minutes (or for any 30 minute period), it goes into standby and I then have to go through the whole scrolling process again. Extremely frustrating! Again, I can think of no reason why Sony would not want to make a firmware change to cure this - unless it really does take pride in making it's customers angry. Ideally I have one player that I would like to leave on all of the time, with all of my music folders selected and ready for me to access quickly.

So lets now assume that I've gotten all that level of folder loaded. There are lots of them. Let's say I've just listened to a ZZ Top album and want to go to a Led Zep. I can either scroll back up the list, or wrap around to A and come down the list. Either way I need to hold the remote for quite some time to go through all of the albums in either order. Why can't I either i) hold another key (like either >> or <<) that would serve as a very fast scroll - like there are on many other devices (like cable PVRs for scrolling through hundreds of channels) that allow either item by item "slow" scrolling or "block" (fast) scrolling; or be able to use the numeric keys to quickly access first letters of folders, much like you can do while texting with a flip phone? For example if I want to go to that Led Zep folder fast, I just hit "5" three times in rapid succession to get to the L's, and then slow scroll from there.

So to summarize my suggestions for firmware upgrades to the your Blu-ray players (and I assume my two models are similar to your whole current line):

1. Auto Power Off / Auto Standby needs to be user-selectable as either on or off.

2. The player needs to continue streaming items from a folder until it has imported all of the items (or until the user selects one of those folders to move to the next level). Ideally it would continue, in the background, to import higher-level folder items so that they are available when the user returns to them.

3. Players need to be able to fast-scroll through folder lists.

4. Players should have direct alphabetic access to folders through the use of the remote's numeric keys.

I would appreciate this getting passed-on to the group responsible for firmware upgrades, and for someone from that team to contact me to confirm that they have received my suggestions. I'd of course be happy to provide additional comments if need be. I very much look forward to seeing these suggestions incorporated into future firmware upgrades.

 

[MatthewB]

Just saw in this weeks circular that the 3100 is now 89.99

 

[MatthewB]

Love this so much I'm buying one for my twin sister for her birthday present. Also giving her my Vudu account so a new Bluray player and 205 HDX movies not a bad present.

 

[jomari]

altho not the same model, my s5100 had an update yesterday.

I disabled automatic updates on the player, simply because it slowers my load up time. but when my netflix didnt work as fast as i wanted it to do (yes, it still does the getting internet info 1/3 2/3 3/3...), i decided to check.

http://esupport.sony.com/US/p/model-hom ... ownloadTab

i also checked your version matt, and here you go for the details...

http://esupport.sony.com/US/p/model-hom ... ownloadTab

not much of a difference, sometimes some machines work better with older firmware versions, but thought id let y'all know about it.

 

[Deleted member 133]

altho not the same model, my s5100 had an update yesterday.

I disabled automatic updates on the player, simply because it slowers my load up time. but when my netflix didnt work as fast as i wanted it to do (yes, it still does the getting internet info 1/3 2/3 3/3...), i decided to check.

http://esupport.sony.com/US/p/model-hom ... ownloadTab

i also checked your version matt, and here you go for the details...

http://esupport.sony.com/US/p/model-hom ... ownloadTab

not much of a difference, sometimes some machines work better with older firmware versions, but thought id let y'all know about it.

I get the update notices and keep my S5100 updated, but none of them have addressed any of my suggestions.

 

[MatthewB]

Updated my 3100 but so far haven't noticed any changes but haven't done much but watch Vudu and Netflix crap I haven't even watched a Bluray yet in the machine.