[bluerum66]

Just read the review on home cinemachoice of the high end sony 5000es and it was praised fantastically on bluray performance i was going to rush out and buy one but then the magazine mentioned the sd perforformace at the end which it said the picture appears soft. Any use sharpening it up in the menus i thought, anyway what hifi said it was one of the best upscaling sd dvd players they had ever seen, i currently have a sony bdp s500 player which i assume would have no better a sd picture than the 5000es. I would expect better if i am pumping all this money into buying this player as i have a lot of sd dvds, i really would opt for one of the pioneer high end bluray players but i am scared of lip sync issues with a few pioneer players i had in the past and thought i would never buy this brand again even though they have picture quality in a league of their own im confused what to do.

[andy1249]

What I will say here having been caught out before with , lets say , " inaccurate " reviews , is that there is no substitute for auditioning.

If you can , try before you buy , because without a doubt , at least one of the magazines you mentioned there is heavily biased and I find their reviews are ridiculously inaccurate.

[nwgarratt]

SD upscaled to HD always looks soft a lot of the time. I made the mistake of watching a BD then putting on a DVD. Big mistake as it looked awful.

I don't upscale using the player most of the time and use the display to do it. It changes from DVD to DVD but looks sharper when I set the players to 480i/576i.

I am currently using a Sony S350.

[kingfats]

Originally Posted by bluerum66

Just read the review on home cinemachoice of the high end sony 5000es and it was praised fantastically on bluray performance i was going to rush out and buy one but then the magazine mentioned the sd perforformace at the end which it said the picture appears soft. Any use sharpening it up in the menus i thought, anyway what hifi said it was one of the best upscaling sd dvd players they had ever seen, i currently have a sony bdp s500 player which i assume would have no better a sd picture than the 5000es. I would expect better if i am pumping all this money into buying this player as i have a lot of sd dvds, i really would opt for one of the pioneer high end bluray players but i am scared of lip sync issues with a few pioneer players i had in the past and thought i would never buy this brand again even though they have picture quality in a league of their own im confused what to do.

Hi bluerum66.
The 5000 has decent DVD playback "certainly" not a soft picture at all has some nice picture adjustments as well.Plenty of use feedback in the owners thread.
If in doubt try and get a demo.
All the best.