Sony media player n100 vs n200

It has an Internet browser. And it plays beautiful p video with Dolby Digital 5. Picture and Sound Quality Blu-ray movies still have a slight edge over streaming digital, but the Sony player makes you work to see the difference. Capable of full p, the video is as good as the video content.

It can handle bit Deep Color, x. Color, and 3D. You can no longer complain about the lack of content as online streaming services, especially Vudu, offer most movies in p. For movies that are available in p or standard definition, it has the Sony Precision Cinema HD upscaler. While the upscaler improves many standard-definition videos, Sony offers more video adjustments that claim to further clean up SD picture quality. When viewing a standard-definition or highly compressed video I shot on a digital camera, there was video noise.

Pressing the Options button while watching the streaming videos brought up a menu of adjustable noise filters: MNR reduces mosquito noise around the edges of objects, FNR reduces random noise, and BNR removes blocky artifacts.

Unfortunately, no amount of adjustment had a noticeable effect on the picture. Vudu has been added to this media player but is still not available on the SMP-N Sony has included many of its own apps as well as apps with its own content. You may notice an icon for video search. Like other media player and TV Internet browsers, you can play videos from some Websites, but the TV networks and many movie sites block the Sony from playing full episodes.

There's not enough 3D content, and there aren't enough buyers interested in 3D. A streaming-media box is all about which streaming services are supported, and the SMP-N does a good job of filling up our chart. Moshcam is actually a video service that streams live concerts for free. There are some significant missing services.

TV is nowhere to be found, nor are many of the popular music subscription services, such as Rhapsody, MOG, or Spotify. Sony's own Music Unlimited is supported, although that doesn't have nearly the support on other devices that competitors do. There aren't any social media Facebook, Twitter, and so on apps, either, although that's not a big loss, since they usually don't translate well to the big-screen environment.

We do miss support for a major photo-sharing service like Flickr or Picasa, as using a box like this is a nice way to show off photos. We actually had pretty good success playing back a mishmash of content off a connected NAS drive, but you're best off searching user opinions on CNET and elsewhere if you're looking for compatibility with specific media types.

We'll also quickly note that there's an Internet browser, but the experience is so slow and frustrating that we doubt we'd ever use it.

We had no problem streaming media over our home network or over the Internet, using both the wireless and wired connection. Of course, streaming-video quality and network performance depend a lot on your broadband connection and home networking conditions, but we had consistently solid playback with the SMP-N Is it better than the Roku 2 or Apple TV? The Roku 2 doesn't really handle your own digital media collection and the Apple TV is limited in the streaming services it supports.

The Sony SMP-N fills that niche, with a good selection of streaming services and decent playback of your own digital media. The problem is that the SMP-N doesn't do anything particularly well. Take the internet TV capabilities of a recent Bravia flatscreen television and shove them into a little box that's operated with one of the coolest-looking handsets ever to grace a multimedia player and you get Sony's latest entry into this competitive In the weeks I was testing the Sony player, I suffered not one single glitch, buffer, stutter, crash, freeze, or file not found.

The SMP-N located most of the media files on my home network sources. But still, with network functionality, you could argue that it's just as easy to store your video on a network-attached storage device or laptop as it would be to store it on your streamer's hard drive.

In fact it could even be easier. Generally speaking, one of the biggest problems with media playback is that, if you use Fat32 as your hard-drive file system, then you're limited to playing files that have a maximum size of 4GB.

We're very pleased to see this -- NTFS support is too rare on media players. A wireless connection won't prove the best way to watch bulky HD video files, but it's a great way to quickly get online and catch-up with iPlayer, or check out the latest cat videos on YouTube.

For speed demons or people without a wireless network, there's a wired Ethernet connection. If you haven't got your house wired with Ethernet cable, then you might like to consider a powerline adaptor , which allows you to move HD video and audio around using the mains cables in your house. Do be aware, though, that powerline adaptors work best on fairly new cables, so, if you have a Victorian house, prepare for reduced speeds.

Making iPlayer, Demand 5 and a host of other online video services available, the SMP-N is one of the best-specified media players around. We've yet to see much more than YouTube support from most other players, although some do offer Internet TV services such as Revision3. The point is that the SMP-N is the first media player to provide premium content over the Internet. The first time you use an online service, the player logs on, authenticates itself and downloads some data.