Nows a good time to get yourself a new Blu-ray player for your home entertainment center.

Insignia NS-WBRDVD This Blu-ray player offers excellent image quality, wireless connectivity, and a pleasing Netflix interface, but it also stumbles in its Wi-Fi setup.

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As a result, you cant find the Power and Open buttons by touch.

And though the players Internet capabilities permit you to stream videos from Netflix and Vudu, it doesnt support YouTube playbacka feature found on competing models at roughly the same price (190, as of May 5, 2010).

Though this model doesnt produce the best images weve seen on a Blu-ray player, it outperformed the Sony PlayStation 3.

In our lab testing, we especially noted the sharp, well-saturated colors in Phantom of the Opera (chapter 3), and the well-modulated handling of whites in the black-and-white Good Night and Good Luck (chapter 1).

We saw some digital artifacting in our Mission: Impossible III clipa scene with a lot of fast camera movements over complex architecture (chapter 7).

And a dusk scene from The Searchers (chapter 20) looked a bit too bright.

Even so, those scenes looked better on the Vizio player than on the PS3.

Blu Ray Player For Os X World 480P Image Look

Admittedly, no player can make an upscaled 480p image look like native 1080p, but the VBR200W did a particularly bad job of upscaling.

The same Phantom of the Opera scene that impressed us with its vibrant colors on Blu-ray looked undersaturated and soft on DVD, relative to video from an identical DVD playing on the PS3).

If you buy a VBR200W, consider playing DVDs at 480p and letting your HDTV do the upscaling.

Depending on how well your TV upscales standard-definition video, the image may look better that way.

Hook it up to your network via ethernet or Wi-Fi, and you can watch streaming video via Netflix or Vudu.

With a good ethernet connection, 1080p Vudu streams made for high-quality viewing.

Though I occasionally spotted compression artifacts in the displayed content, the image approached Blu-ray quality most of the time.

Netflix image quality doesnt come close to that, but its acceptable.

Usually, Netflixs image quality and its user interface are identical from one player to another.

The VBR200W uses the latest implementation of Netflix, however, which lets you pick movies to watch via the player, rather than first having to use your PC to put the desired program into your queue.

Besides working with these commercial streaming sites, the VBR200W lets you listen to music via Pandora.

It also supports Internet feeds from Facebook, Flickr, the New York Times, Picasa, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

Like most Blu-ray players today, the VBR200W also lets you plug a flash drive into its USB port to listen to music (.wma and.mp3 files), view photos, and watch videos.

The music will continue to play as you view photos, which makes creating adding background music to a slideshow a snap.

The players single USB port is on the backan acceptable location if its only function is BD Live memory, but a nuisance for multimedia.

Another physical design problem: The front-panel buttons are pressure-sensitive spots that provide no tactile feedback.

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