The appearance of Sigmatek's SBR-1000 Blu-ray player marks something of a landmark in the availability of High Definition movies to the general public.

It's the very first model to retail for a list price below 250 euros (320 USD / 220 GBP), and it's already available online for less than 200 euros (260 USD / 175 GBP).

Will it be able to compete with the stiff competition at such a low price?


Unpacking this player gave us a few early indications: the finish quality is fairly average, and the remote control looks particularly cheap.  On the outside, at least, the SBR-1000 doesn't seem to pull it off, but its performance remains to be seen.

Setting it up allowed us to see what connections are available.   Analog outputs are limited to stereo audio, while digital sound is provided over HDMI 1.3 or an optical link, both of which only work with 5.1 surround sound.

With the player plugged in, we had a little look through the menus.  They're not much to look at and don't give you many options.  Irritatingly, the localization hasn't been done very well so the interface sometimes offers a mixture of languages as you can see here.


We slid in our first Blu-ray disc and ... 1 minute and 10 seconds later, enjoyed the start of the film.  It's a long time, but unfortunately not much worse than plenty of other players out there.

More alarming is the fact that the movie was very jerky.  The first film that we tried was quite simply unwatchable.

 
After a little investigation, we discovered that the problem was the fact that 24p mode was turned off.  As soon as we reactivated it, everything was fine.

This presents another problem though: what are you supposed to do with a 1080p/24 Hz TV?  There aren't many for the time being, sure, but if you have one, you should avoid this player. 

Once we got 24p working on a regular TV, the image was very nice, but not quite as good as what you get from some of the big names like Samsung, Sony or Panasonic.


Watching our standard Blu-ray test disc, the first thing we noticed was some initial jerkiness.  The problem was once again with 24p mode, because, only most movies, our test scenes were filmed at 60 Hz.

Even set up correctly, though, the results weren't quite perfect, and although you're unlikely to be using 60 Hz discs at home, the lack of fluidity doesn't really inspire confidence in the Sigmatek's performance.

This is the only Blu-ray player that has had this kind of problem with our test discs, so it's hardly a good sign.