Sony BDP-S360

The basics

The Sony BDP-S360 is a tweaked follow-up to the BDP-S350, and sports all the Blu-ray goodies you'd expect from Sony, including support for BD Live.

It's also pitched at a very reasonable price-point – making buying into Blu-ray a much more palatable option.

The good

When you first fire the BDP-S360 up, you'll notice Sony's slick Xcross Media Bar menu system (as seen on the PS3). Unlike most bargain-basement graphics on other media players, the Xcross is a pleasure to use and great for Blu-ray newbies.

And when you finally load up a disc the positives continue – the S360's picture processing is taken care of by Sony's 24p True Cinema technology, which serves up action sequences with fluidity and realism. Picture quality is amazingly crisp and detailed, balanced by a warm and realistic colour palette.

Upscaling DVDs produces equally ace results while and audio playback is crisp and punchy, so we'll forgive it the lack of multichannel audio outputs, pumping it out over perfectly ample HDMI instead.

The bad

As this is an affordable model, there's a bit of a lack of bells and whistles – as we mentioned, there's no mulitchannel analogue outputs, no Wi-Fi and no on-board memory.

The bottom line

If you're looking for an affordable Blu-ray player with a dazzling performance and aren't bothered about extras, then look no further than the BDP-S360.