Sony BDP-N460 Blu-ray Disc Player (Black)

Comment: I bought this item for my wife for Christmas and we're very pleased with it. Maybe once a week I have a minor glitch with Netflix that easily corrected by restarting the video. I have a wired lan with another computer and a printer that I set up myself with an older router that still does 1000 megs/sec, and I have Time Warner Cable with roadrunner
turbo boost that downloads 6 megs/sec. The picture in HD and even DVD is great. You tube runs perfectly, and I like the fact that there's USB port in the back that I can load a flash drive with videos or pics and see them on a BIG screen.
Blu Ray Discs look breathtaking and the upgraded DVD picture is very good as well.
It's changed my viewing habits that's for certain, and I thought for all this the price was very good.

Comment: It's simply lousy when one tries to use their internet features. Whether it be Netflix, Youtube, Slacker, whatever, it's really really slow in connecting, if it even does. I don't consider waiting 5-10 minutes for a connection to these services to be acceptable. Many times the connection attempt just times out/fails.

I have no issues with blue-ray playback quality, some DVDs look good upscaled (Universe by the History Channel for example), whereas others look so-so at best. I don't know what the deal is with that.

A minor quirk occurs when I try to use my Samsung TV's feature of streaming video from computers on my home network - if I connect directly to the network, I can access said computers and play video. If I am connected to the Sony player (so I can use it's online features), I cannot access the computers to stream video from them. I have to disconnect the network cable from the Sony unit and connect it to the Tv, turn TV off and on again...not a huge issue that the Sony unit doesn't act like a router, but it is a minor inconvienence.

Comment: I purchased the N460 in December 2009. Delivery was fast, no complaints there.

In March 2010, the optical disk drive failed. wouldn't see any disk. I went to the Sony web site to get warranty service. After filling in all details, I clicked on the button to confirm everything, and got the following:

Error
Sorry, that page is temporarily unavailable.
Please check back later.

I've been getting the same response for 3 days.

So I tried calling their customer service number. After 2 minutes of wending my way through the voice menus, I got the helpful message, "we are experiencing heavy call volume, please try our website at. . ." and was disconnected.

So either Sony products are failing at such a rate that they can't keep up, or they have completely abandoned any pretense of customer service.

Comment: It took only 30 minutes from opening the box to watching a streamed Netflix movie. The set-up process was straight forward although instructions might be challenging for those with limited tech skills. I think Sony needs to do a better job with their instruction manual. I don't know who writes these things but most of them are terrible. I run my Sony Blue-ray Disk Player through a Samsung LCD TV. Streamed video off the net is pretty good although there are occasional hang-ups usually at the exact wrong time. However most of the blame has to go to my internet provider when this happens. For the price picture quality, loading speed, Dvd upscaling are good. So far my Sony BDP-N460 Blue-ray player has worked well.

Comment: The product really is quite good. I had a problem getting Youtube to work. It was flaky (would not load and tried connecting forever).
The problem was with my wireless router. The distance from the router to the wireless bridge was too great for my old G band. I got an N band to increase range and it worked fine. If you think you have this problem take your cable modem and router to your player and hard wire it into a port on the router.
Some observations with youtube: If playing a clip catches up to the incoming stream it hangs forever without re-buffering. It may get confused with out of sequence (or missing) packets and does not seem to know how to recover.
Going to Sony support is a nightmare, figure it out yourself. They only know "the playbook" and can't think out of the box.
If you have DVD's you'll really notice the upscaling. It is not quite HD but very very good.
Netflix is very acceptable also even HD but documentation on how to get it going is confusing.