For those who are not familiar, a blu-ray player is the next gen DVD player which is capable of playing HD movies at 1080p resolution, which is 5X better than std DVD.
I bought Sony BDP-S370 bluray player in June 2010, from Chroma, Bangalore for Rs 9800/-.
It was at that time the cheapest BD player with all the features:
1) Plays BD, DVD, CD and SACD(but no VCD)
2) Has USB(accepts a USB hard disc) and Ethernet, has optical, coax audio outs+ HDMI
3) Plays most formats(wmv, avi, mkv .)
4) Supports Dolby true HD, DTS HD etc
5) Supports IP-TV, DLNA etc
It worked well in the beginning except for a few problems with some bluray discs. It can play movie files from a hard disc as long as it is formatted in FAT32(does not work with the new NTFS format, which is the normal one these days)
It however used to play 4:3 DVDs as stretched 16:9 and no options used to work to get it back. Soon a firmware fix came to fix this problem. After installing the new firmware, this issue got fixed, but stopped playing the blurays in 1080p/24 mode correctly with my Harman-Karden AVR. I had to force the player to a lower resolution 1080i/60 to get it working. Further firmware updates failed to fix this problem. The performance seemed to be quite good when playing a regular bluray disc. However .mpeg files were again stretched to 16:9 with no way of going back.
Suddenly this month(after about 1.5 years of purchase) the blurays stopped playing. Taking it to Sony service center in Koramangala, they told that the optical unit has gone bad. The repair charges would be Rs 5300/- only! The new BD player now comes at Rs 8K+, and it did not make sense to repair this buggy old guy. Currently it is lying in my loft gathering dust.
I was a fan of sony, thinking that their products are more durable and they have a better service network, but it turns out that I might have been wrong. I should look at other companies like LG or Philips for BD players.
Sony have updated the model to BD-S380, with same features, except that it now reads FAT32 also. I am however skeptical to buy this, after my experience with the old BD player.