Complaints that Blu-ray is too expensive—we say it often—may soon be harder to justify, now that Pioneer will release the $250 BDP-120 in April. It’s just a Blu-ray player—no fancy Netflix streaming here—but if all you’re looking for is an inexpensive player (and have no interest in the PS3) you could do worse.
Higher up the Pioneer food chain is where you’ll find players with some sort of auto-tuning feature. Like, you plug the player (preferably, a Pioneer one; it works, to an extent, with non-Pioneer ones, too, though) into the TV and it fiddles with the settings to best optimize it to your TV. Like, if you have your TV set to sports mode the Blu-ray player will auto adjust itself for optimal output. These will be a little more than $250, as you might expect, with the BDP-23FD rocking out at $600.
Too bad movies these days are rubbish.