Insignia NS-WBRDVD3

Insginia NS-WBRDVD3

With the Insignia NS-WBRDVD3, 3D Blu-ray players become a commodity. The $120 price (as of November 17, 2011) puts this player in the price range of low-end 2D models. But in exchange for that price, you'll have to lower your expectations, especially in important areas such as image quality and streaming Internet content. In our image-quality tests, the Insignia never bested our reference player, an updated Sony PlayStation 3. The NS-WBRDVD3 did its worst job on the Blu-ray of The Searchers (chapters 4 and 20). Shot in 1956 in Technicolor and a high-resolution format called VistaVision, The Searchers has a dense, highly saturated look unlike current movies. Images from The Searchers looked good going through the NS-WBRDVD3 when we considered it on its own, but next to the results from the PlayStation 3, they looked flat and dull by comparison. The Insignia had almost as much trouble with the animated Cars (chapter 1), which also has unusually saturated colors. And images looked soft and contrasty (when compared to the PlayStation 3) in Good Night and Good Luck (chapter 1), which, as a black-and-white film, has no color saturation at all. The NS-WBRDVD3 stumbled even more at upconverting DVDs, tending to lose detail here as compared with the PlayStation 3.