Sony DVD Players

Sony old reliable DVD players of every ilk

As Sony is a giant of consumer electronics it should come as no surprise that Sony DVD Players come in all forms. You have portable DVD Players for watching movies on the road and home theater DVD players, of course with a huge range of prices and features. One kind of DVD Player you wont find from Sony, however, is the Universal DVD player that is a DVD Player capable of playing two different high resolution audio formats, DVD Audio and SACD. This is because SACD is Sonys own proprietary format designed to compete with DVD Audio.

If you own a formidable multi-channel home audio system you owe it to yourself to give one of the high res audio formats a try. If Sony DVD is what youre looking for, your desire for SACD playback may complicate things slightly. Sonys own line of SACD players are purely CD players only, not DVD players. If you get a chance to use a player with Sonys own SACD format, it will give you the best sound you can have on the current generation of optical media.
On the top of Sonys DVD Player heap is the 400 disc Mega Changer, capable of 720P/1080i upscaling video through its HDMI connection. A variety of standard DVD players with HDMI video capability rounds out Sonys selection for under $200. These are all middling quality, and Sony is known as a reliable name in consumer electronics so any of your Sony choices are sure to be long lived. However, as audio components they wont be up to the task of a good quality hi-fi system, with the exception of the SACD players that tend to be a little more expensive.

A word of caution before investing significant amounts of money into a DVD player: were just around the bend from a whole new plateau in optical storage. Soon Toshibas technology HD DVD and Sonys own Blu-Ray are going to be fully realized and on store shelves. The PS3, Sonys super gaming platform will feature a Blu-Ray player and an HDMI port for the best possible video quality from a player. Youll want to think about the possibility of waiting for the next generation to arrive in early 2006.

If you do decide to wait and buy one or the other competing format you must ask if youre willing to spend money to cast a vote on which technology will flourish and which will be the obsolete technology. In years to come early adopters of one or the other (HD DVD or Blu-Ray) are going to have a machine and whatever discs they bought at the time sitting in their media room and theyll have stories to tell about how they bought the wrong one and how they dont make the discs anymore but the sound and video sure are great. A bit like a Beta VCR owner would have done back in 84. There is just no easy answer to todays evolving technologies.