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Gregory P.

Gregory P.

Joined on 01/10/09

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Product Reviews
product reviews
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Most Critical Review

RUN from this player

Sony Smart Wi-Fi & 3D Blu-ray Disc Player
Sony Smart Wi-Fi & 3D Blu-ray Disc Player

Pros: Menus easy to use. Network setup worked good.

Cons: Everything else. Constantly locks up, will not reliably play video file from proven to work DNLA devices. Even playing a Blu-ray disk locked the player up when I hit stop.

Overall Review: Bought this on impulse (my fault) as a component to consolidate my 3D Blu-ray player and WDTV. I have bought and setup several video and audio components over the years and the advertised features looked like they would cover what I wanted. Should have done my research. Setup was actually pretty easy, set a static IP which connected flawlessly, started to do an update and everything went downhill from there. Update failed 5 times before it finally completed, even after verifying connectivity using the network tools in the "Settings". Netflix setup okay, menus seem easy to use, now the fun begins. I have a WD cloud NAS that has been serving up movies flawlessly to a couple Samsung and LG components, as well as my WDTV. At first I could not even get it it to show up in this players menu. And yes, my NAS is a DNLA device that works with everything else I have. After a few restarts and reboots finally got that to show as an option. Try to navigate through a few folders to get to my movies and the scan feature finishes and just shows a folder icon with nothing in it. Back out and try to rescan several times, same thing, just the circle of death in the upper right hand corner. Reboot both the device and the NAS, navigate back in and now see some movie files, but wait!! Half are missing. After some basic observation I narrow it down to any movie files encoded as .mkv. Great (that research thing biting me in the behind again). At this point I still really want to get it working and even consider having to convert all my .mkv files to .avi or .mp4. Okay, finally get to the playing of movies and I found that even formats it recognizes it is hit or miss if it will actually play the file. Reminder, all these files have proven to play flawlessly on my WDTV, TV streaming app, stereo / Blu-ray player app, Samsung Blu-ray player (most of the same functions as this Sony except 3D) and even an older WDTV device. Problem is not the files contrary to what Sony 1st level support tries to say or sell to get you off the phone or chat. Yes, contacted them twice. Got the normal usual, do firmware update, problem is not our player it is your files responses. Playing a Blu-ray disk went okay, right up to the time the movie ended and I hit stop. The player did just that, stopped playing, stopped doing everything else also. Just locked up on a blue screen with no menu, and no control to do anything else. Tried to wait it out for 15 minutes just in case something might be running in the background. No dice, cannot get it to navigate, eject disk, nothing. Finally had to unplug and reboot the device to eject my disk. In summary, I played around with this thing for 6+ hours before finally getting so frustrated I just unplugged it and packed it back up into the box to return it. I remember not long ago when Sony was an industry leader and produced quality devices. I have owned several Sony TV's, stereos, and players, was always happy with them. My experience