Comments on: Get an Insignia Blu-ray player for $129.99

Best Buy's house-brand player is strictly no frills, and it requires a firmware update right out of the box. But if you want a home-theater upgrade on the cheap, look no further.

[zgreenwell]

It makes me miss HD-DVD players. I bought a $99 player while the format was still viable and it had an integrated ethernet port and, like all HD-DVD players, had comparable features to Blu-Ray live. I guess we're getting there slowly with Blu-Ray. Now if they would only make the movies cheaper.

[pscull]

With VOD getting more popular and TV's w/ built-in internet access becoming common, the days of physical media are numbered. I watch Vudu movies in high def and love the picture. Plus, I never have to leave the house or wait for the disc to arrive!

[Forked_Tongue]

Agreed, I think cable and satellite days are numbered as well, watch shows when I want and with more internet appliances coming out cloud, streaming sites, and VOD will be the future.

[don_bidarian]

You know the bitrate is different right? You can notice the difference in fast moving pictures and also big TVs.

[Haroldnca]

I'm holding off on buying. Personally, I think the future is in streaming HD content and not having an actual disc that you pop in a machine. I think DVD's will go the way of the CD. But that's just my opinion.

[NervClaX]

A little off topic, but in case anyone is interested, Dell has the most-excellent PSP-2001 slim for only $119.99 and free shipping.

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Sony_PSP/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&sku=A1320879

Mine is being delivered today. :)

[tcr071]

Hm. We are almost to the point that HD-DVD was 18 months ago where you can get a player for $99.99. Only that player came bundled with two free movies, you got to pick five free movies from the store, and then Toshiba mailed me 5 movies for free as well. I paid $99 for an HD-DVD player with features still not available on most blu-ray players and 12 free movies. Still waiting for a blu-ray player to hit $99 WITHOUT a dozen free movies.

Yup. Definitely sounds like the best format for the consumers won. Right...?

[chrkeller]

Yeah the best format did win. BR offers far more storage space.

[ospideyo]

I remember when Toshiba was trying to keep HD DVD alive and they lowered the price of the player to $99. That was a last ditch effort to keep the format alive. By the way how did that work out for them? We all know the answer.

"Yeah the best format did win. BR offers far more storage space."

That's the kind of idiotic thinking that sunk HD DVD in the first place. When you watch high quality 1080p content, at what point do you think "man this looks bad since the disk only holds 30 gigs of data"? The BD platform was always poorly implemented overkill with superior marketing that has obviously taken you for a ride.

[tcr071]

@chrkeller - Actually just before HD-DVD died there were announcements of a 50GB HD-DVD disc. Not that storage capacity matters, at all, because even at 30GB there was ample space left on the disc that wasn't be used at all. HD-DVD had far more features going for it two years ago than blu-ray has even now.

@ospideyo - They were able to lower the price because the format was cheaper and easier to produce, not because it was a last ditch effort. Blu-ray players were being slashed in prices as well but the cheapest they could possibly make it was to $199.99 which was a price point HD-DVD was at WITHOUT a sale back in January of 2008.

[chrkeller]

Taken me for a ride, yeah I don't think so. HD-DVD was nothing but Toshiba being greedy and not wanting Sony in control of a clearly superior format. The extra storage space BR has to offer makes it easy for uncompressed audio, something HD-DVD struggled with. If anybody was taken for a ride it was those who thought HD-DVD ever had a chance.

[the_iceman]

lol @ insignia, best buy's house brand. I'll pass...no matter the cost.

[xophaser]

BB commissioned LG to make a bare bone Insignia, so not a bad machine really. Just design looks bad.

[dc137pd]

I got one for $99 at Best Buy, took it home and went to hook it up and found that I didnt have an available HDMI port. Wasnt gonna hook it up via component so I took it back.....

[ev61]

good story, could have used a vampire.

[felderga]

I think this machine is a barebones Samsung and not LG

[1kingsfan]

I'm with the_iceman - I wouldn't touch Insignia with a ten-foot pole. I already have a samsung BD and a PS3 and I think Blu-Ray will take off when the standard is finally set AND you can buy a GOOD BD player for $99 - not some stripped-down piece of junk.

[Robert Griffith]

Got an HD DVD player and 2 Blu-Ray's and while they're great machines,the player manufacturers have waited far too long to lower the prices ,especially Sony. What i want to know is when will Sony distribute a firmware to lessen the spin up and play times on their players? Too much money for too little satisfaction. Don't know what they did that caused their demise ,but HD DVD is still a great format

[felderga]

I would only buy this as a player for my bedroom. I think the $119.99 deal for the PSP Slim from Dell is a better deal if you have money to burn right now :)

[C0mmanderB0nd]

Will any of the new movies even play in a 1.1 player??????

The few Blu rays I have that were BD Live would not even work in my Laptop player until I updated to 2.0, which wasn't as easy as it should have been btw (thanks to Dell). The Auto update feature kept looping and saying the updated completed sucessfully but it did not.

Buyer beware picking up a player this cheap as there maybe no 2.0 upgrade and that could leave you out of luck with all the latest movies all using BD live/2.0..

For example "The Dark Knight" is BD live.

[felderga]

I just saw this at BB on clearance for $99.

Also unless you hook this thing up to the Internet, BD Live is not a big deal. You do as mentioned in the review need to install the latest firmware to work with newer disc.

[paulimusmaximus]

I'll wait. I got a philips dvd with upconvert that looks pretty darn good. I never buy movies anymore, I get them all from netflix, or redbox, so since netflix raised their blu ray price, and redbox doesn't offer blu ray in my area, I'll just wait till blu ray is more prevalent, and I get get a better brand than insignia for under a hundred.

[ean_kile]

I think 129.99 would be a magic number if it was on a player that reviewed better than two and a half stars. Whatever happened to that Vizio player that was supposed to come out in April? The only info I can find on it is dated back to January.

[jjayguy23]

In my opinion disc media is dead. We should all look towards the cloud for our media/entertainment. We should download everything.

[gvortex]

This player is actually made by Funai (and not by either Samsung or LG), and it's actually not that bad. The only gripe I would have with it is that lack of regular firmware updates. But, for the price it would make a great gift to someone new to Blu-ray, or even a good second player for the room or the kids.

[Stories84]

I'm surprised at the number of folks on this thread who are absolutely clueless on so many aspects of Blu-ray.

1.) A movie with BD-Live (2.0) features on it will still play on a BD-Bonus View (1.1) player. It just won't activate the BD-Live features. If the player won't play a disc, it's because of the DRM on the disc, not the fact that it has BD-Live features on it that makes the disc unplayable (see: Samsung P1400 player).

2.) HD DVD is constrained by the 30gb size. Transformers, Bourne, and a few others released on HD DVD lacked lossless audio. The BD releases have TrueHD. If that's not proof of the size limitation, give me an explanation of why the HD DVD release didn't have lossless audio.

3.) Triple layer HD DVDs didn't have a prayers chance of reaching the mass market. You know why? Existing HD DVD players were incapable of reading the discs. So the triple layer disc (and its 45GB space) could not be utilized by the (approximately) 1 million people who bought a HD DVD player. Finished spec? Right.

Blu-ray won the HD format war because it had larger support/backing from the studios. More options for DRM allowed more content producers to sign up and make content on Blu-ray. Also, let's not forget the PS3 for helping to push extra BD players into the laps of gamers.

[felderga]

Actually there were quite a few HD-DVD disc that had either TrueHD or DTS HD. Bourne Ultimatum had TrueHD and Pan's Labyrinth had DTS HD just to name a few. True the majority of disc were encoded with just Dolby Digitial, but I don't think size was always a factor.

I'm really curious as to how many people actually play back using True HD or DTS HD? Remember when HD-DVD first hit there were only a few high end recievers that offered this feature. For me, it's not major reason to upgrade as I fine with Dobly Digital.

Again if you're looking for a second BD player (i.e. for your bedroom / office) then this is probably a good deal for a player. However in a year from now I suspect most players will be in the $125-$175 range anyway.

Also check your local BB as I've seen this one marked down to $99.

[Stories84]

The first two Bourne (Identity and Supremacy) only came encoded with DD5.1+ on HD DVD. The subsequent BD releases had TrueHD on all three movies. Often, you find this trend is fairly common throughout most HD DVD releases later released on BD.

Currently, only the mid-range and up receivers have DTS-HD MA and TrueHD decoding, but almost every single player now decodes the lossless codecs on the player itself you get PCM audio out of your player (all the big name players: Panasonic, Samusng, LG, Sony, etc.). The great thing about this is that you can connect your audio receiver via HDMI or Analog and get the lossless sound. So even those with older receivers can still get lossless sound if they don't want to upgrade to a HDMI receiver.

[chrkeller]

Excellent post, I agree 100%. BR was clearly the superior product and I am very glad it won out in the end. DTS-HD MA and TrueHD are a fairly large step up from 5.1 digital. My Onkyo receiver was $600, not top end and it has on board decoding.

[prberg]

I think blu-ray is great. If I didn't already have a player I probably would scoop up this deal. The picture and sound quality are just the best. Plus when I get a blu-ray burner for my PC I will be able to put alot of my RAW pictures on one disc. How cool!

[douggdangger]

Just buy a Bluray drive for your PC, rent the movies and rip them to your HD.

For the price of 4 bluray movies, I can buy a hard drive and store about 80 1080p rips in them with no loss in quality. All I pay for is the rental membership.

For about the same price as purchasing 1 bluray movie, that gives me a full month's rental of about 10 bluray discs in my que (if I rip and return them fast enough). Not bad.


That should do it for me in the next year or two until the disc media dies.

Sony and the movie industry help destroy the superior format that was working since day one, friendlier to the consumer, and was more affordable.

I'm taking revenge for Toshiba by giving my money to Netflix and hard drive manufacturers and not to Sony and the studios. ;-)