Pioneer BDP-51FD BonusView Blu-ray Player

The Pioneer BDP-51FD is one of the most well built Blu-ray players under $500 you will find in the market. And, with its latest v1.17 firmware virtually all of the bugs have been squashed plus DVD upconversion is now superior even to high end chipsets like Silicon Optix Reon. Pretty amazing what big strides this player has made in a short period of time. The Wolfsen DACs provide outstanding analog audio and the many A/V tweaks such as the Source Direct feature will keep tweakheads happy for a long time to come. While this player is not as user-friendly as some of the competition, once you've delved into all of its settings you will find that you can maximize A/V quality in a way not possible with other players. Highly recommended for the moderately experienced (or expert) home theater enthusiast!! Nothing else in this pricerange comes close.

I purchased this Blu-ray player to match my new 50" Pioneer Kuro 5020 TV. I was overly impressed with the combination. This is my first plasma and first blu-ray player, but they blew away my expectations. I have watched CARS and Polar Express in Blu-Ray on this and they are perfect. I also put in an old standard DVD of the Godfather to see how bad the grainy movie would appear on a large plasma display. It did a great job of upconverting the picture. It appeared to elimiate the grainy look that you get when viewing it on a normal tube tv, I can only assume that the BDP-51 is the reason for the better picture quality conversion and not just the tv I am viewing it on. I would definitely recommend this product. The only drawback is that it is not BD-Live for those of you who want to play on the internet while watching your movies (not me).

I got this unit from Amazon at almost 1/3 off the MSRP; at that price I almost feel guilty. This is among the higher-quality BluRay players with regard to picture and audio quality. So far I've watched about a half dozen movies on it and I couldn't possibly love it more. My A/V receiver predates HDMI, so I needed a player with multichannel audio outputs. This unit has high-quality Wolfson DACs that really produce outstanding sound. Perhaps the most important thing to be said about this player (any current player, for that matter), is you must *update your firmware*! As of this writing the current firmware version is 1.17 (my unit arrived with version 1.02 installed) and it fixes a ton of bugs present in earlier versions. Current firmware and instructions for installation can be easily found on the Pioneer USA website with a little patience. Still missing currently is the ability of this unit to decode DTS Master Audio, but it is promised in an any-day-now firmware upgrade; th... Read more

Pros: I have owned 6 blu-ray players before this one from brands like Sony and LG, all great players, but this one right out of the box shines quality, Only player I have seen to upscale to 12 bit deep color, loads fast, responds to menus well, quiet operation, will pass all HD audio bit stream and decodes HD audio, some people complain when there is no backlight on the remote, its nice but I'm not a remote critic, if it does its job then good enough. Works seemless with the picture on a Pioneer Kuro plasma, a must have. Cons: firmware came as 1.00, it won't let me play The Matrix on Blu-Ray, but Pioneer responded the next day, they will send me the 1.08 update, so be prepared to update. Other Thoughts: Movie makers keep messing around with the JAVA for NEW features, they need to settle down so our players don't need an update every 3 months when a new movie comes out on disc.

Well I must admit I was excited about Pioneers new lineup for summer 2008, I bought their new 1018 receiver which sounds fantastic with my paradigm speakers. I decided to pair my receiver with the new BDP-51 player since it matched up well in looks, quality, and video/audio specs. I must admit when placing the I AM LEGEND BD in the player I was astonished at how crisp the colors and sounds were on my new Panasonic 42" 1080 plasma. Then after placing in the TOP GUN BD and BATMAN BEGINS BD I found the player having difficulty loading the BDs, I had to press stop and then play and also play around with the menu button to finally get the BD to load. I would say the BD player froze atleast 75% of the time when playing these titles. I am now checking on the firmware updates in hopes that the bug can be fixed otherwise I'll be sending it in. So I'm definitley disapointed with the bugs I've noticed. When it works though its a beauty both in sight and sound....