The Sony BDP-S 550 is a Blu-ray, DVD, and CD player, available since summer 2008. Sony's recommended retail price is 330 GBP.

• Excellent HDTV picture with 24p support.
• HD sound as a bitstream-output.
• BD-Live functionality.
• Analog 7.1-channel audio.

• DVD de-interlacing doesn’t always work.
• No DTS-HD decoder.
• No MP3 playback.

We liked the full video adjustment options, BD-Live capabilities (with a supplied memory stick), and optional quick-start function. Overall, an excellent performance, but we would like to have seen better DVD movie playback, and support for MP3 music files.

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Introduction

At 330 GBP, Sony’s BDP-S 550 costs 100 GBP more than the S 350, but for that you get analog 7.1-channel audio and numerous video functions. The analog audio output provides owners of older AV receivers with powerful surround sound, although there’s no support for the DTS-HD format.

Features and Operation

Almost everything you need: The Sony BDP-S 550 has both an Ethernet and USB connection, allowing you to download BD-Live content and store it using the supplied 1-gigabyte USB stick. You can also see the 7.1-channel analog cinch output, but this does not, sadly, support DTS-HD audio.

 

Sony’s newest Blu-ray player looks gorgeous with its high-gloss finish. Under the hood, as with the BDP-S 350, there’s a “Precision Drive” HD disc drive, which — Sony says — will balance out variations in Blu-ray discs.

The developers have provided an optional quick-start function, which increases standby power consumption to almost 10 watts, but provides record-breaking switch-on speeds, and loading times of just 18 seconds for DVDs and 27 seconds for Blu-rays.

Supplied: The BDP-S 550 comes with a 1-gigabyte “Micro Vault” USB stick for storing BD-Live content.

Besides the network connection required for BD-Live content, the player also has a rear-mounted USB socket. You can use this to connect the supplied 1-gigabyte USB stick, allowing you to save the additional BD-Live content.

Bear in mind, however, that download speeds can make this system a pain: Even using a 3-megabit DSL connection, it took us almost 12 minutes to download a 2-minute HDTV trailer for “Daddy Day Camp” — even in SDTV quality, this still took 2 minutes.

The familiar, responsive PS3 menu crops up once again.

If you like the PlayStation 3’s menu design, you’ll be right at home with this player. Sony’s familiar interface allows swift access to deep, branched submenus, where you can manually adjust the 24p playback or HDMI color space.

The backlit remote control’s “Options” button brings up a full set of video settings, including a 6-point gamma correction. Here you’ll also find the practical “AV Sync” function, which delays the sound by up to 120 milliseconds relative to the picture, allowing you to synchronize audio and video perfectly.

The Sony can output all high-bitrate audio formats as a bitstream via HDMI, while Dolby’s Digital Plus and TrueHD are also available as 7.1-channel PCM audio. On the other hand, PCM output of DTS-HD audio is limited to 5.1 channels, since there is no decoder for DTS Master Audio or DTS High Resolution Audio.

Remote Control:

Clearly arranged and backlit buttons give direct access to various functions, as well as useful information on the audio and video formats currently in use.

Worthy of praise:
The remote control’s “Display” button provides information about the current video and audio formats, as well as the AV codec. As with the BDP-S 350, this player can play back high-resolution camcorder videos in AVCHD format, but sadly not MP3 files. It can, however, display photos with top-quality scaling to HD resolution, accompanied by handy preview thumbnails.

Picture Quality

 

Excellent: We use this scene from Chapter 2 of “Antarctica Dreaming” to see how Blu-ray players handle complicated camera pans. The Sony had shown problems with a 1080i test Blu-ray from HQV, but here — and with other HD documentaries — its picture was perfect. Stills and motion shots displayed sharp and flicker-free.

Blu-ray:
We admit it: We’re impressed. In HD mode, the Sony shows very few weaknesses, and displays test patterns in perfect sharpness. De-interlacing of HDTV material essentially works well, although the test patterns containing rotating bars on the Blu-ray test disc “HD HQV Benchmark” flicker and appear with only half of the full vertical resolution.

Apparently though, it’s only this Blu-ray that the player doesn’t get on with — other 60-hertz material, such as the documentary “Antarctica Dreaming” is razor sharp and flicker-free. HDTV productions from the BBC — mastered at 50 hertz — are also devoid of flicker. The progressive movie pictures are simply flawless — as usual, the Sony plays them back error-free from either 24- or 60-hertz material.

Perfect: The HDMI frequency response shows almost no dampening of high frequency information. Color decoding was correct for both Blu-ray and DVD.

 

DVD:

Satisfactory: We use this scene from Chapter 12 of the movie “Gladiator” to test DVD de-interlacing. Throughout the movie, and especially with complex images such as this one, moving edges showed flickering, stair-step effects, since the disc has no “progressive flag”. Increasing the sharpness only worsens the artifacts.

In essence, everything here is the same as the earlier BDP-S 350 model. The player can only produce correct, flicker-free de-interlacing of DVD movies if the disc’s progressive flag is set correctly. If this is the case, the extended video settings allow sensitive fine-tuning of the picture sharpness. Concert recordings at 50 hertz show no irritating stair-step effects, but fast-moving test patterns did show slight fringing in the 100 hertz test run.

Sound Quality

Excellent: The audio frequency response is tidy, and the signal-to-noise ratio was an impressive 102.9 decibels.

We cannot predict how a player will react to your particular model of AV receiver, so this information can only serve as a guideline. For our listening test, we connected the Sony to an X-SR 806 receiver from Onkyo. For HD audio, the player’s best detail resolution and spatial depiction came with bitstream-output, with the receiver taking on the tasks of decoding, conversion, and amplification.

After careful level adjustment, PCM audio rendered almost identical results: The guitars and vocals of Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds on Dolby’s Blu-ray “The Sound of High Definition” maintained their high resolution, and only the audience’s applause sounded less vivid. In Diana Krall’s CD album, “The Look of Love”, the vocals sounded more homogenous via HDMI, but brighter when connected to the Onkyo via the coaxial digital connection.