David Vaughn

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/passengers.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>After a plane crash, a young therapist, Claire Summers (Anne Hathaway), is assigned to counsel the flight's five survivors. When she begins to uncover conflicting accounts of the accident, she chalks it up to traumatic stress disorder&#151;until the survivors start vanishing one by one.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/pp2.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>The bumbling Inspector Clouseau (Steve Martin) is called when treasures around the world begin to mysteriously disappear, including the priceless Pink Panther diamond. With a dream team of international detectives at his side, Clouseau must apprehend the master thief known as the Tornado.

With a long history in optical disc technology, Pioneer has been slow to develop new and innovative features in its Blu-ray players. While its previous offerings have been on the upper end of the pricing range, the company’s players have left a lot to be desired. Last fall, I reviewed the Pioneer Elite BDP-05FD player for our sister publication, UltimateAVMag.com. While I was very impressed by its sturdy build quality, it was unreliable, with lip-sync issues and player lockups. It also couldn’t internally decode DTS-HD Master Audio. Granted, a firmware upgrade eventually fixed most of these issues, but the DTS-HD Master Audio upgrade didn’t happen until early this summer—more than six months later than Pioneer promised. As a founding member of the Blu-ray Disc Association, you’d expect Pioneer’s players to be among the most innovative on the market. Sadly, that hasn’t been the case.

But that’s all in the past. The Pioneer BDP-320 brings a lot to the table at half the cost of the Elite branded BDP-05FD. The BDP-320 is BD-Live compliant and has 1 gigabyte of internal memory. Memory is also expandable via the USB port on the back of the player. The back panel includes one HDMI 1.3a output with support for 48-bit Deep Color (not supported by either DVD or Blu-ray), an Ethernet port, component output, and 7.1 analog audio for consumers with legacy equipment that lacks HDMI inputs.

Pioneer’s involvement in optical-disc technology started with the development of Laserdisc late in the 20th century, and the company has continued the tradition with CD, DVD, and Blu-ray. Surprisingly, despite the company’s background and solid history of new product development, it hasn’t been at the forefront of Blu-ray player innovation. The last player I reviewed from Pioneer was in 2009 (the BDP320). It offered fantastic audio and video, but its load times were poisonously slow and it offered no add-on features like streaming or DVD-Audio and SACD support.