Yamaha BD-S2900 Blu-ray Player Review
Yamaha has made a late entry into the Blu-ray player market with its BD-S2900. Surprisingly, while the high level of competition in this market is driving most manufacturers to look at price cuts and cheaper models, Yamaha has entered straight in the top end with a price tag of $1,199.
The BD-S2900 is a profile 1.1/Bonus view Blu-ray player so it offers picture in picture playback and all the other Profile 1.1 features. However, it is surprising that a Blu-ray player of this price does not offer Profile 2.0 features such as BD-Live Web functionality. Still, the BD-S2900 is up there with the best of the Profile 1.1 players.
The BD-S2900 offers BD, DVD, MP3, JPEG, AVCHD and CD audio playback via its disk drive. It also has an SD card slot which may be used for both AVCHD and JPEG playback. Since it is not a Profile 2.0 Blu-ray player, it does not have an Ethernet port so online firmware updates and BD-Live Web features are not available. Since this is a new model, updates may, as frequently happens, become available after a few months and not being able to directly access them will be a problem.
As for the video playback, the BD-S2900 offers HDMI, S-video, Composite video and component video outputs. In the case of the HDMI video, there are a variety of resolutions to choose from so matching it to your TV’s display capabilities is fairly easy. You can choose from 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p/60. The same kinds of options are available for component video as well. The set up menu is simple and easy to use and offers a wide range of picture adjustments including the normal range of 4 pre set modes and a user adjustable mode where color, brightness sharpness and various other picture qualities can be changed to suit individual likings. However, the four presets are very swell set up and provide more than enough picture quality options so it is unlikely that any but the most finicky viewers will want to fiddle with the user mode. Once you get into the user mode the danger is that you will continue to keep making minor adjustments just to see what the best picture could possibly be and find, in the end, that what you have come up with is one of the four pre sets!
While the video abilities of the BD-S2900 are on par with other Blu-ray players of its class, its in the audio area where Yamaha seems to have gone off the rails a bit. The BD-S2900 offers 2 and 5.1 channel analog audio output. This seems a bit odd since the current trend in analog audio is 7.1which places the BD-S2900 at a disadvantage. Of course, since the unit does not have Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio decoders, offering 71. Channel output would really make no sense. The BD-S2900 also offers coaxial, HDMI and optical digital audio.
While there is nothing wrong with the BD-S2900, it is surprising that a company of Yamaha’s reputation should enter the Blu-ray player market with an offering that is priced at the high end of the spectrum but does not offer the features to match the price. It appears that the design concepts were frozen over a year ago and no one thought to tell Yamaha that the market has changed since then.