14 DAY TRIAL // What's the first thing that comes to mind when hearing the name "Yamaha"? Probably a very fast and aggressive Japanese motorcycle, or at least that's the case with yours truly. However, the company is also one of the best-known names on the A/V product market, since it has come up with a very solid lineup of various speakers and receivers over the years, so it's actually no surprise that it has decided to jump on the Blu-ray bandwagon as well.
Unfortunately, though, Yamaha's foray into this particular market segment has not exactly been a very successful one, at least as far as the company's latest model is concerned. And that's because the BD-S2900 Blu-ray player, launched only a few days ago, offers what could only be described as standard features, while retailing for an absolutely insane price.
Like most other products before it, the BD-S2900 can output 1080p via HDMI at 24fps and also provides 12-bit Deep Color compatibility, being able to deliver 4096 shades of each of three primary colors for a total of 68.7 billion possible colors. Furthermore, it offers certain upscaling capabilities via the Chroma Upsampling engine.
Additionally, high bit-rate audio signals (Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio) are output directly from the player to the receiver (via an HDMI cable) without conversion to PCM. The device also offers support for BONUSVIEW features, such as Picture-in-Picture and Virtual Package.
Using the BD-S2900’s remote control, users are able to view a secondary picture inside the main picture, with compatible Blu-ray discs. In addition, the BD-S2900 can output the secondary audio. Virtual Package lets viewers combine information from a Blu-ray Disc with content on an SD card to enjoy additional multimedia and interactive possibilities as they become available.
However, as mentioned earlier, the BD-S2900 lacks exactly the few things that would have made it really competitive, namely the support for BD-Live and an Ethernet connector. In this way, the device can't carry out firmware upgrades and can't access the online content available for certain discs. And the worst part is... this thing sells for the huge price of 1,200 US dollars, which could get you a PS3 AND a decent HDTV to watch Blu-rays on.
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