Picture, Controls & Navigation Features

Noisy spinning, mediocre joystick/enter button on remote, no backlight on remote

First off, I admit this was an unresearched impulse purchase, but I want to share my findings if it will help someone else make a better informed decision.

The picture and sound are both good, my only complaint is a very occaisional moment when the picture & sound seem to pause for a very brief moment. I don't know if other players suffer from this, but it happens infrequently enough, and it's so mild that it's hardly worth mentionning.

The controls on the front of the player are excellent, and the remote is mostly good, except that there is no backlight (the glow-in-the-dark doesn't quite cut it for me), and the dual-purpose joystick/enter button doesn't work all that well...positive control up/down/left/right is a little iffy, and pressing down on it for 'enter' feels (and sounds) a little cheesy and sometimes moves the cursor one direction or the other.

Other than that, the look & feel of the player is good--the jog dial on the remote is nice, and I very much like the rotary knob for track navigation (great for CD play; much better than hitting next-next-next-next-next) -- just spin the knob to the track, and press to play. Unfortunately it doesn't work for programming--you need to use the joystick (fortunately there's also one on the front of the player) and imagine the on-screen display to do it.

My biggest beefs with the player are noisy spinning during playback (worse for DVD than CD, I think) and that until I got it repaired (under warranty) I had increasing trouble playing audio CD's...they would not track well, and would skip to the point of being unlistenable. On the positive side, servicing was pretty quick...the unit was shipped back to me in about a week, and the problem appears to have been rectified. As for the spinning noise, a unit belonging to a friend suffers from the same ailment. It's noisy enough to disturb during quiet movie scenes; perhaps if the player was in a cabinet it wouldn't be audible. Also, once I have a full compliment of speakers (currently have only 2), perhaps the sound will better mask the mechanical noise.

All in all, a nice unit, but Sony missed on a few points, plus the need for repair cost it a star for both value and overall ratings.

Picture Quality, Sound Quality. Well built.

No DTS decoder. No zoom feature. Not multi region without chipping.

Price above in £ sterling.

Bought for video only source. I use a separate system for CD replay.
Picture quality is excellent, as is sound quality. Picture is sharper than others tested. The lack of DTS is a big downside though. Especially when cheaper players (Lecson at £170) have built in DD and DTS decoder with not much loss in the way of picture quality. When DTS becomes more popular in UK I will invest in new processor.

Overall an excellent product though not best for value. I could have had a machine with almost as good picture quality with DTS decoder and multi region to boot for half the price.

Similar Products Used:

None myself though have checked out DavS300, Lecson 2000, Hitachi 305 via friends.

I get audio/video synch problems often. I'm getting very tired of it. I can't watch A Simple Plan without having to stop it at least 3 times to fix the problem. And I really love that movie!
What's the latest revision number? My 1.8 isn't cutting it.

I may have already watched over a hundred DVDs on this great DVD player. No problem whatsover. It has been delivering nothing but fantastic picture quality and i love that jog scan feature. Whoa.

Hi folks 2nd time here about my 550D.....First I sympathize to those that have had problems with this unit.
Second I admit there is a problem with this unit BUT after spending many hours reading here and the newsgroups almost all players have there "problems". Sometimes an owner will never have a problem.
Well I am one of those (so far) and this is my 2nd opinion, you can scroll back to August 24 to see my first review.
I have now watched 43 movies on this unit (I had a little marathon over Labor day weekend).
I have had no problems I may lucky or?.....But I join the ranks of SCORES of others here that state that this is a solid unit.
If you get ao good buy on it buy it.

In case anyone is interested, there is an article in Sound & Vision's latest issue which mentions the Sony lip sync problem--it all sounds very familiar after reading reviews here. I myself have purchased the 550D (four months ago) and have experienced lyp sync problems twice--with Austin Powers and Ronin. However, in both cases, the discs were rentals and were expectedley soiled with finger prints. After a good cleaning, the lip syncing was not a problem!...By the way, no one else has mentioned this but the auto soundtrack selector, which is supposed to select the soundtrack with the highest number of channels, does not seem to work! No matter what I do, the soundtrack for There's Something About Mary always seems to pop up as two channel Dolby Digital. Can someone tell me what's going on??

I reviewed the 550d heavily here at AudioReview before buying. I was very concerned with the delayed audio mentioned, but havn't experienced on the 10 or so movies I've watched so far. Sound is crisp and clean, Images are outstanding and the control over the dvd is fantastic. The jog countrol on the remote works very well, although as a professional digital artist, I find the shuttle portion of the jog countrol to be clumsy and not up to what I'm used to.
While I havn't had the voice sync problem I have had the dvd skip on a retivly scratch free cd. It was only on though so I am not ready to blame the dvd. While I would have liked to go with the 7700, the price was to far out of reach and the 550d was a phenominal choice.

The digital decoder works beautifully and the onscreen setup controls are unbeatable.

For this price, (I got the 550d at Tweeters for $399) there can be no less than a 4.5

Mike, I believe the latest revision level is 2.10. A word of caution, however, if you plan on having your player upgraded; I, and two friends purchased this player back in April when they were first available. Our revision level was 1.5 and we all had the lip-sync problem. All three players were taken to a local Sony service center for an upgrade. One friend received his player back with level 2.10 and has had no problems to this point. Another got his back and has had numerous problems just reading the DVDs. He took it back to the service center again, they replaced another part and he then encountered "freeze-ups" when playing. It is now back to the repair center for the third time. In my case, they told me it would be fixed in 5-10 days. Without getting into all the details, they had my player for a month, replaced 3 parts, and were still waiting on another which they said was back-ordered. I had enough at this point, told them I did not pay full retail for a refurbished product, and demanded a replacement from Sony. After two days of vehement complaining to both the service center and Sony, they finally agreed to send a new player which took another 10 days. The new player has revsion 2.01 and seems to be working fine at this time. However, I have watched only a few movies to this point. Moral of the story is this: if the lip-sync problem is not severely pervasive, I would think twice about letting the service center "upgrade" it. All of this aside, the quality of the audio and video are fantastic. I rate the player a four due to the lip-sync problem.

Purchased my unit in July 99. I am very happy with the picture, however, I have encountered the lipsync problem with two titles so far (Enemy of the State and Mighty Joe Young).I am planning on taking the unit to the Sony service center soon.
What a pain in the butt. I expected better from this higher than entry level model.

Great DVD player. Got mine 9/12 and it had 550D/b on the box. Player had lipsync problem with only one title I own, that was The Waterboy. Picture was great, sound was great, remote is the best I have used with any DVD player. I contacted Sony about the lipsync problem, the took my name and number and said they would contact me when they found a fix. The important thing to remember, this lipsync problem is not on all titles, only a few.