CNET recently took a look at the Insignia NS-2BRDVD Blu-ray player and gave it a rating of 5.8 out of 10 (2.5 out of 4 stars). The Insignia is a bargain Profile 1.1 player with a starting price under $200. A firmware upgrade coming in March 2009 will make it a Profile 2.0 player.

Although the CNET review summary states that the NS-2BRDVD delivered a solid 1080p HD picture, in fact, it failed most of their image-quality testing. For instance, the player could not depict all the resolution of a text pattern provided by Silicon Optix’s HQV Blu-ray test suite. It also performed poorly in two other picture-quality tests.

Some other characteristics CNET did not like were poor DVD playback quality, slow Blu-ray disc loading, and lack of onboard decodng for Dolby TrueHD DTS-HD.

Links

CNET review of the Insignia NS-2BRDVD