For one two simple reasons.
- It is the only blu-ray player I know of to actually SHOW YOU INFORMATION. What do I mean by this? Well, if you press the Select button on your controller while watching a blu-ray (or DVD), an overlay appears with the usual information one would expect to see: time elapsed and remaining, and title and chapter numbers.
But it also shows you the current audio codec being used, the number of audio channels, the current bitrate of the audio, the video codec being used, and the current bitrate of the video! This information is so cool and useful!!! And no other blu-ray player I've ever used has the balls to expose this information to the end-user! It literally harms nobody, if you don't know what any of that info means you can just Ignore It. But it's massively interesting to an AV nerd like myself.
- It gets updates to this day. One of the most irritating parts of blu-ray is that in the corporate quest to lock it down better than DVD was, it got bogged down with DRM that requires regular updates or else modern releases may literally not play on your blu-ray player. This has been a real and constant issue with older blu-ray players especially, where they just won't work with modern discs because the player's firmware hasn't been updated with the latest keys.
The PS3, meanwhile, has been consistently receiving updates from Sony long after its end-of-life, which consist of nothing more than the latest AACS keys. Which one would expect, since Sony developed both blu-ray and the PS3, and the PS3 is almost solely responsible for blu-ray trampling over HD-DVD.
Now I just need to know if the PS5 has this information in its 4K blu-ray player. If it doesn't, I have no reason to get a PS5.
