Verdict

Pros

• Generous feature list
• Stunning pictures
• Slick operating system

Cons

• No DivX support
• Menu not ideal for web content selection
• Not cheap

The BDP-S790 is Sony’s current top-of-the-range Blu-ray player (until the BDP-S5100 is launched next month, that is) and as such it’s crammed with all of Sony’s most advanced features and tricks. These include built-in Wi-Fi, access to Sony’s Entertainment Network and, for the first time on a Blu-ray player, 4K upscaling.

Design
It’s also a stylish, living room friendly piece of kit. With its black-as-night finish and 42mm height you’ll barely notice it in your AV rack, but rest assured it looks great. The matt black underside is curved, while the top half is pure gloss-black goodness. The top panel shimmers with a brush-effect finish, embedded with three illuminated ‘soft-touch’ controls. Lovely stuff.

The fascia features a disc tray on the left, a small LED display in the middle and a covered USB port on the right – one of the ways you can play your own media files through the deck.

Connections
On the rear panel is a suitably generous array of sockets, led by a pair of HDMI outputs that allows you to output 3D pictures to a TV and HD audio to an AV receiver separately – solving a problem if your receiver isn’t 3D compatible.

They’re joined by two digital audio outputs – one coaxial, one optical – and analogue stereo output for good measure. Composite video out, Ethernet and a second USB port make up the remainder. That’s pretty much all bases covered, unless you’re looking for old-school multichannel analogue outputs, which have fallen out of favour.