BDP-S5000ES High-End Player Touches Down

Another mouth-watering piece of kit was announced by Sony today at IFA Berlin. Designed to complement some of the other new ES series products we talked about earlier in the week (the SCD-XA5400ES and the 5400ES amp, which in Europe will be prefixed STR and not TA-DA), the BDP-S5000ES has got to be the most highly spec’d Blu-Ray player to date and will surely be at the top of every home cinema enthusiasts’ shopping list. What sets this apart from the other players out there is the quality of the hardware and components. Everything has been designed to give the highest possible performance and best possible audio-visual experience. For example the analogue audio board is isolated from the video and servo sections to avoid interference, and the player offers Linear PCM and HD audio decoding with bitstream output, and 7.1-channel analogue outputs. It will handle all formats up to Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, either decoded internally or output as bitstream.

On the visual front it features a new “HD Reality Enhancer” that continually analyses the image coming from the disc, sharpening edges while not over-emphasising other elements of the picture, reducing the effect of grain on the original filmstock, and increasing the colour depth from the 8 bits on the disc to the equivalent of 14 bits. I will be interested to see how this works in real-life, but it sounds very appetizing. Meanwhile Super Bit Mapping, should ensure smoother colour tones.

It goes without saying that this model is fully BD-Live and BonusView compatible so that you can make the most of all of those Picture in Picture commentaries and multi-angle replays and other live content that is now appearing on more and more BD releases.

A natural consequence of this is that the player has an ethernet port that can be used for directly updating the firmware via the internet on to the unit and of course additional BD-Live content can be downloaded and stored on the inbuilt 1GB flash storage.

The player also features the user friendly XrossMediaBar menu system and comes with full Bravia sync capabilites for control over HDMI.

Here are some more photos of this beautiful unit: