Mark
Green Bay
administrator
Best Buy's house electronics brand Insignia, which I find to be very good products on the whole, has added Netflix Instant View streaming to its two dirt-cheap Blu-ray players, via a firmware update. The NS-BRDVD3 runs $179 in-store and the wi-fi enabled NS-WBRDVD runs $199.
However, there is an offer for Best Buy Reward Zone members that makes the two players $99 and $149, respectively, through this Saturday. Both players are also Profile 2.0 and BD-Live ready, so they beat the pants off the cheap-o Magnavox players at $99.
Would you get one of these now that there's a BD-Live player with Netflix under $100?
Posted October 21, 2009 10:45am in
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I would sooner go with the
I would sooner go with the Samsung refurbished Blu Ray at Buy.com or Amazon for $149.99. I do not trust anything Best Buy brands let alone the store as a whole.
I've had good luck with
I've had good luck with Insignia stuff so far. The tube-style HDTV I bought five years ago is still going like a champ. It's essentially a Toshiba unit with a generic stamp. Many Insignia DVD products have been LG units rebranded. Not sure about the Bluray players though.
I think if you can get a Profile 2.0 Netflix-playing Bluray player for $99, it beats the Roku box at the same price.
Just as a side note, I did
Just as a side note, I did pick up one of the Insignia NS-BRDVD3 players at Best Buy for $99. On the Reward Zone coupon, it listed "regular price 149.99 - 50 = $99.99" however the in-store price still lists at 179.99. At the register, they couldn't get the price down to the coupon price of $149.99 before the discount, so I had to take care of it at the customer service desk.
Got it all hooked up to my HDTV (my older tube-style 720p model without HDMI since I don't have a flat-screen right now) and I have to say that it works great so far. Plugged it into my ethernet and it downloaded a firmware update to enable the Netflix viewing. Don't have a Blu-ray disc yet to try but I've got one coming by mail in the next day or two. Played a bit of two movies streamed from Netflix in HD and the quality is great. Love having the Netflix option on a low-price player like this. I even tried a regular DVD in it and it upconverted it to 720p quite nicely. Looking forward to pairing it with a nice 1080p LCD in the next few months.