Gadgetory

hey I'm Matthew miskovic from cnet and we're going to take a look at the sony bdp s 590 this is a mid-priced 3d blu-ray player it's right in the middle of Sony's line and it's currently selling for a hundred and forty dollars now most blu-ray players these days look pretty boring but Sony actually made the s5 90 look pretty nice the finish on the top has a cool textured look to it and the way that it tapers down towards the bottom is a nice touch there are a few front panel buttons and a USB port but that's pretty much it around back you'll see the standard HDMI optical audio output and ethernet jacks plus there's built-in Wi-Fi on this you also notice that Sony includes a few extra ports compared to competitors including a coaxial audio output in another USB port both the front and the back USB port can play back a variety of digital media formats and while most blu-ray players aren't great local media streamers the Sony actually did pretty well with the divx and the MKV files that I threw at it the user interface uses Sony's cross-media bar menu system that's also used on the ps3 now while that works pretty good on the PlayStation it doesn't work quite as well with the blu-ray player especially when you're scrolling through endless amounts of video services Sony's list of streaming media apps is impressive including netflix hulu plus Amazon Instant Pandora and voodoo and we're happy to see that Sony has finally updated its Netflix app to have the latest interface although the interfaces for Amazon Instant in hulu plus still lag behind competitors if you're getting a blu-ray player specifically to use Amazon or Hulu Plus I'd probably suggest another player sony also has another interface for browsing its apps called the sony entertainment network and this layout is actually nicer with an easy tile-based layout but since it requires an extra step to go into that menu I can't imagine a lot of people are going to use it luckily if you just want to get to netflix there's a dedicated button right on the remote so you can skip all the menus completely image quality was excellent on blu-ray movies dvds and netflix but that's to be expected since all blu-ray players basically have the same image quality of these days on the other hand the sony is relatively slow loading discs in some cases taking almost twice as long as other players so if you watch a lot of blu-ray movies you'll have to be patient overall the sony bdp s 590 is a really nice-looking blu-ray player with a pretty strong set of features but because of the slow load times and the user interface quirks I think the editors choice winning panasonic DMP BDT 220 is a better choice for most buyers i'm matthew miskovic and this is the sony bdp s 59