Sony BDP-S790 review

The BDP-S790 plays a Blu-ray disc from standby in less than 30 seconds, making it average in terms of speed, but it has a comprehensive set of image quality options. They’re contained within a pop-up menu that’s only accessible when watching a Blu-ray disc, but you get complete control over brightness, contrast, colour and hue, along with block noise, frame noise and mosquito noise reduction. There are also more advanced settings that include options for increasing detail and sharpening and smoothing images, such as Clear Black, Super Resolution and Contrast Remastering. You must play around with each setting to get the best results, but we were impressed with how far you could take each one without introducing unwanted noise or motion artefacts. If your TV lacks more advanced image processing settings, you’ll still be able to get fantastic results with the BDP-S790.

Here’s a 100% crop from Star Trek, showing sharpness from Blu-ray video – click to enlarge

For reference, here’s the same scene played through a PS3 console – click to enlarge

We couldn’t test its 4K upscaling feature, but it coped well with 1080p Blu-rays. Dark scenes had plenty of depth, but colours were always preserved and shadow detail looked gorgeous. Colours were vibrant and images were impeccably sharp, even without the extra image processing. You get slightly less colour control than you do with Panasonic’s high-end Blu-ray players, but we think Sony’s image processing gives it the edge.

With so many features, it’s obvious why the BDP-S790 is Sony’s flagship Blu-ray player. Its Smart TV services are fantastic and picture quality is outstanding, especially if your TV lacks more advanced processing functions. We’ll have to withhold judgement on its 4K abilities until we get the chance to put it through its paces, but it’s currently one of the best Blu-ray players you can buy.