Review: Insignia Blu-Ray Player

Insignia, if you didn’t know, is a brand name of Best Buy. Think of grocery stores and their in-house brands and you get the idea of how Insignia works for Best Buy. Of course, Insignia doesn’t make peanut butter and their products should not be considered generic. Insignia’s new Blu-Ray deck is an excellent example of this fact. When I removed it from the box I was struck by how sleek it looks. The front panel is almost entirely featureless and is glossy black. There are power and eject buttons and a basic control pad and, of course, the disc drawer.

Technically, the Insignia NS-2BRDVD is a very capable deck. Aside from the obvious Blu-Ray disc playback functions, it is also capable of playing standard DVDs. Its also capable of handling DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD and CD-R/RW discs and can read MP3, WMA and JPEG formats. It is also able to upconvert standard DVDs and outputs digital video in 720p, 1080i, and 1080p via the HDMI output port. Sadly, it does not come with an HDMI cable, but it does ship with a Composite set in the box.

The real business comes when you disconnect your old DVD player and plug in the BR deck using an HDMI cable. I connected the deck to my Westinghouse 32″ 1080i LCD TV. I was initially concerned that not having a 1080p capable set would limit my experience with Blu-Ray, but I was very, very wrong. I did not have to see the output of my old HDMI-capable Sony DVD deck next to the Insignia deck’s output to see the difference. It was immediately obvious to my wife and daughter and myself when I pushed in Over The Hedge.

The upconversion quality itself is astonishingly good. The colors are cleaner and sharper. The blacks are deeper. Even the surround sound is better (or that could have been in my mind). The overall clarity of the picture is just plain better without question. My PR rep had assured me that it would improve picture quality on 1080i, but now I knew for sure. What I was not prepared for, though, was an actual Blu-Ray disc. I’ll say it this way: I now feel bad that I don’t have a 1080p set of at least 42″ in size.

The picture is so good and clean and clear that I want to fill up my living room wall with it. This is the kind of good that makes you want a home theater very badly. I’m not heading in that direction any time soon, but I will definitely focus some of my energies on getting that upgrade in place as soon as I can. In the meantime, I can now marvel at the fact that I talked crap about Blu-Ray for no clear reason.

Okay, it was mostly because I’m sick of Sony constantly trying to take over existing markets with proprietary technologies which are incompatible. They couldn’t do VHS. They had to create BetaMax. They couldn’t get in CDs. They had to do the MiniDisc. They couldn’t jump on board with SD cards. They had to create the Memory Stick. It appears, however, that it was just time which would tell in the case of HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray… but I digress.

It turns out that there is something about Blu-Ray which I didn’t know; there are versions. There are versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 and not all Blu-Ray players are capable of all of them. One purchaser/reviewer on Best Buy’s website stated that, while this Insignia deck has Ethernet and USB ports specifically for software updates and BDLive, the hardware is currently using Revision 1.1. If it is, I can’t tell. Of course, when I get more Blu-Ray discs I’ll likely be able to test this.

In the meantime, I’m going to deeply enjoy what I already have and see where it takes me. The one thing I would ask Best Buy and/or Insignia to do is to add about 5 oz. of weight to the remote. Either that or change from AAA batteries to the slightly heavier AA batteries. Retail price for the Insignia Blu-Ray deck is US$250, but Best Buy is offering a US$50 discount so you can the deck for US$200. Not too shabby.