PIONER BDP150 ANDROID
PIONER BDP150 TV

It picks out the finest details, like the stubble on Selvig’s face and the texture of Banner’s tweed jacket, and backs it up with rich colours, smooth shading, crisp edge definition and judder-free motion tracking, which really helps when following the movie’s busy finale. This is immediately apparent when viewing Avengers Assemble.

PIONER BDP150 TV

It passes the pixels to a TV without any glitches, errors or artefacts, leaving you with pictures that look clean as a whistle and sharp as a tack. With an AV heritage as rich as Pioneer’s, it comes as no surprise to find that the BDP-150’s picture quality is superb.

PIONER BDP150 ANDROID

You can also operate the player over a network with an iOS or Android device installed with Pioneer’s iControlAV2012 app. The remote is more plasticky than the BDP-450’s zapper but its button layout is thoughtful and the labelling is clear. The setup menu is neatly organised and covers all bases, including Video Adjust settings (contrast, hue, brightness and saturation).Ī separate set of picture adjustments appears when you select the Custom picture preset, which could negatively affect image quality if you make adjustments in both menus. Play music from USB or DLNA devices and it displays track details with cover art, which is a nice touch. The main menu offers access to the Home Media Gallery where you can access content on all connected sources, and Web Contents where you’ll find YouTube, Netflix and Picasa – listed in a rather uninspiring way.

Thankfully all of the menus are easy to navigate and quick to respond. The BDP-150 keeps it real with no-nonsense black backgrounds, static dialogue boxes and monochrome images for each menu section. OperationĪlmost every player we see these days has a flashy, kaleidoscopic menu system with HD graphics and slick animations, but Pioneer is having none of it. Not all Blu-ray discs do this by default, so it comes in handy if you need to visit the setup menu, as you can’t access it during playback. The Continued feature allows you to bookmark a point in the film, so you can resume from the same place if you have to press stop. Sound Retriever Link boosts the quality of compressed music formats when played on a compatible Pioneer amp, while Stream Smoother reduces picture artefacts on low-bitrate videos. Naturally the Pioneer handles all HD audio formats, outputting them as bitstream or decoded PCM. The same formats can be played from USB storage devices, and it’s nice to discover that the BDP-150 will play Super Audio CD, marking it out as a deck for music lovers as well as film fans. Network media streaming is possible thanks to the deck’s DLNA certification, and format support is excellent – DivX HD, WMV, AVCHD, AVI, MKV, MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, 3GP, FLV and JPEG. This is all a little hard to swallow given that several similarly priced players (and some cheaper ones) come with Wi-Fi out the box. If that’s too pricey then you’ll have to hook up the Ethernet port.

Even more disappointing is the news that the BDP-150 lacks integrated Wi-Fi – to get it you’ll need Pioneer’s optional adapter, which will set you back around £50.

Pioner bdp150