Pioneer BDP-120 Blu-ray Disc Player - Blu-ray Quality at an Affordable Price

Author's Rating:

Pros: excellent audio and video quality, reasonably priced, easy to connect and operate

Cons: slow to load, must change factory default settings, no auto-resume feature

The Bottom Line: 
An affordable and high-quality Blur-ray player from Pionner, which has always been a terrific name for electronics.

Author's Review
I had been holding out buying a blu-ray player for a long time. I own DVDs and I watch them. Buying into blu-ray seemed unnecessary. Then someone else I live with bought an Xbox and told me it played blu-ray discs. I bought a bunch of blu-ray films and shows, figuring I could watch them, then learned that the Xbox doesn't play blu-ray discs. I was then in search of a blu-ray player that wouldn't cost me a week's pay.

I'd had Pioneer audio components in my younger days and felt very good about the brand. So when I saw the Pioneer BDP-120 Blu-ray Disc Player at what I considered an extremely reasonable price, I ordered it immediately. It had generally good reviews from the site I ordered it from, and it arrived at my home in less than a week.

SET UP

Setting up the Pioneer BDP-120 Blu-ray Disc Player is really easy. The HDMI cable doesn't come in the box, so that's an investment you'll want to make either when you order it or from a local electronics store. If you're like me and have an older television, check what jacks are available. My large-screen television doesn't have and HDMI input, but it does have a DVI input. There are cables that will go from the HDMI jacks on the Pioneer BDP-120 Blu-ray Disc Player to a DVI input, but then if you ever upgrade your television you'll have to buy a new cable. We bought a cable with HDMI on both ends and then an adapter for the HDMI end to go into the DVI input on the television.

Other than that, setting it up consisted of plugging it in. That was it. It can be connected using standard video and audio cables to video and audio inputs, but you will lose out on some of the picture quality. You might not notice it on the blu-ray discs themselves, but you'd likely notice it on standard DVD discs which are up-converted using this player.

If you are using the HDMI connection, you'll need to go in and change the factory default settings for audio and video outputs. This is done off of the start-up menu and isn't something most people will know. Why they set both to the lowest possibly quality settings is beyond me. It's something that should adjust on it's own but doesn't. I changed the video from the default 480p to 1080dpi and the audio from basic stereo to 5.1 digital surround sound.

LOAD TIME

One thing I heard about blu-ray players in general was the longer load times for a disc as compared to standard DVD players. Without seeing how long it takes other discs to load, I still think this has a pretty long load time. One of the first discs I put in, the newest Star Trek movie, actually gave me an error message on the screen. I thought “Oh, great!” but I just let it go and then it ended up loading fine. DVDs load fine without much delay. Just don't buy into the “quick start load time” that's advertised. I thought the load was pretty slow for blu-ray discs.

PICTURE QUALITY

The picture quality on the Pioneer BDP-120 Blu-ray Disc Player is fantastic. We noticed it immediately, especially with a standard DVD that we'd watched not too long before on the standard player. It up-converts these if you are connected tot the television via an HDMI cable – the same won't be true if you use the standard video connections.

On blu-ray the images are beautiful. The colors are more vibrant than ever before in the 36-bit deep color. I might not have been convinced before I saw a few of my favorite films in blu-ray that there was such a huge difference, but seeing is believing. Just a preview of The Wizard of Oz in blu-ray has me drooling over that.

The up-conversion of standard DVDs also produces noticeable results when compared to the DVDs played on my Sony Carousel player. The pictures are much more vibrant, although the same level of clarity isn't achieved as is with the blu-ray discs.

UPDATING

One thing that's different with the Pioneer BDP-120 Blu-ray Disc Player as opposed to other electronic devices I've owned is that the firmware inside needs to be upgraded from time to time. There's a USB port on the device for this and a flash drive comes in the box. The update I did was easy – I printed out the instructions from Pioneer's website and downloaded a zip file to my computer. I unzipped the files and copied them to the flash drive, then plugged this into the USB port and followed the directions to install the upgrade.

OPERATION

For the most part everything is self-explanatory on the remote. A few issues I have is the ability to go back in and change the settings once the device has booted up – I haven't found a way to do that just yet. When I had to change the audio and video settings, I changed the video but forgot about the audio and had to shut it off and wait for it to power up to the point I could access these settings again.

The other quibble I have with the player is that when a disc is stopped or removed, the next time it's started it doesn't automatically start from the place you were last viewing. I know my carousel player will hold this information for up to 40 discs in its memory, so its a function that should have been easy to add on a player that plays one disc at a time, even for only the last 5 discs. As it is, my only alternative is to hopefully remember the scene I was on and use the progressive scanner to get there. For this reason, when I am viewing some of my DVDs that I know will end up being stopped in the middle and likely removed from this player, I will stick with using the DVD carousel player.

The remote that comes with the Pioneer BDP-120 Blu-ray Disc Player will also work television controls if you want it to. We have so many remotes already that I didn't bother programming it. It easily brings up the functions that are on the blu-ray discs themselves although it took a bit of playing around for me to discover all that it can do. It's a bit more sophisticated than typical DVD remotes.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Pioneer BDP-120 Blu-ray Disc Player has so far proven to be the right blu-ray player for us at the right price. The quality is excellent and it's easy to operate and update. The load time is pretty slow, but that seems to be the case across the board with blu-ray players. I do miss the auto-resume feature on it. We didn't need Netflix streaming since we do get that through the Xbox. Check what connection you need before you order it an plan accordingly and you should be quite happy with what you get from this reasonably priced player.




© 2010 Patti Aliventi