On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 11:31 AM, Bhairitu wrote:
The UHD player is a Sony 700X which I got a good deal on.
Several months ago I was considering the Sony 700 or 800 to replace an older Blu-ray unit but I decided to get the Panasonic. Back in the day (2008) Yamaha released what was at the time the highly rated Yamaha BD-S667 Blu-ray Disc Player, followed by the 671 and then the 681. They were designed to fit in with RX series Yamaha receiver.These days Yamaha is out of the DVD disk playing business. Go figure.
Old review:
"Prior Yamaha blu ray players (1065, 1900) were Sharp-based players that lacked any real redeeming quality save an opportunity for Yamaha receiver owners to have some commonality in their rack. Upon reading the press releases of the 667, a few things caught my eye - that worrying quick start feature was dropped and the inclusion of dlna made me wonder whose format the player was based. It did not appear to be Sharp-based (unlike the new Pioneer releases) and also lacked the usual Funai or LG look and layout that is generally easy to spot.
The 667 arrived Thursday afternoon and I have been pushing this unit through an abnormally high number of tests. Its GUI, OSD, and setup menu were very familiar in that they struck me as very similar to my Oppo 83 and 80. The initial setup and overlain setup menu were different in look and lacked a number of options the Oppos have, but had an overwhelming Oppo-esque familiarity to them.The center-mounted disc drive is a bit pokey, opening in 10-12 seconds (very similar to the Oppp 83 EAP first-run drives), but load times were very fast and were only outpaced by the newest Samsung models. Upon checking synthetic deinterlacing tests, I knew we had found the very competent Mediatek chipset. In fact, its synthetic deinterlacing tests for film cadence matched the Oppo BDP-80 identically. Unfortunately, its video deinterlacing was not quite up to par with the Oppo BDP-80.Real world DVD testing revealed a very competent player that could not quite match the Pioneer BDP-320's sharpness or the Oppo's accuracy in avoiding aliasing, but was damn close. The player's biggest deficiency is a lack of fine tuned noise reduction to bring a more detailed edge to the image. That said, the player is very versatile and offers the same smooth, accurate image other mediatek chipped players produce. The player offers a zoom function for dvds that is effective and similar to that offered in the Oppo 80, but a bit different in its gradients.In respects of analogue audio, the 667 offers only stereo outputs that are adequate, but not inspiring in my testing. Moreover, it does not offer SACD or DVD-A playback like the Oppo (or even the Sony 470 for the former), but it does offer DLNA connectivity and Netflix streaming."
