After weeks of research, I picked up a LG BD390 and haven't looked back since.
Let me start from the beginning. I had just purchased a 55" Vizio LCD TV, capable of full HD (1080p), my old HD TV was DLP based and only capable 1080i. I was using an older Philips DVD player that up-converted to 1080i as well. But, I wanted something that could give me the full 1080p HD experience on my new TV and I wanted something that could handle files as well as BDs and DVDs. My old Philips played MP3, JPEG, PNG, AVI, WMA, DivX-HD, XVID, MKV files and more. More importantly it had a USB port that you could plug a FAT32 flash drive or external HD into and it could read those files from that instead of requiring them to be burned to a Disc. My new BD player had to have all those capabilities as well.
The BD390 had everything I wanted and more. It could read a very wide variety of files types and here's the good part. It can read those file from almost any PC, WIRELESS. Yes, it has built in 802.11 connectivity. If you don't want to use the wireless functionality, don't worry it works on standard 100Mb Ethernet too. All you need to install on the PC, if you already don't have it, is a UPnP media server such as Nero's Media home, which comes bundled with the BD390. Which means, you can browse photos, music and video clips. from a PC, without needing to burn them to a disc or hook the PC up to the TV. It has no problem displaying full size JPGs taken by an 8 Mega Pixel digital camera and it displays them in very high detail too (1080p), which is very nice. It has a handy slide show feature and it allows you to rotate and zoom in.
If you have an internet connection the BD390 can access Netflix, CinemaNow, Youtube without the aid of a PC. If your into Netflix or CinemaNow you can download movies directly to the BD390 and watch a wide assortment of new releases and older classics, for a price though. I think NetFlix has unlimited downloads starting at $7.99/mo. It's a little awkward using YouTube without a standard web browser but you adapt to it quickly. I downloaded Big Buck Bunny, a DivX-HD file from [...] just to see how it looked. While the clip was cheesy the picture quality was incredible. The BD390 had no trouble playing a file that freezes up on most of my computers. It plays Blu-ray discs well to. But after using the BD390 for a few months now I'm pretty sure ALL disc's DVD's and Blu-ray are going to be a thing of the past. With hard drive space getting cheaper than blank optical media I transferred most of my DVDs to my PC hard drive and the BD390 plays VOB files without a problem, which means you can keep them in MPEG2 format. You don't need to trans-code them. At today's HD prices your looking at less than 40 cents per film and I'm sure that's going to keep dropping. I've barely touched on what this device does.
This is definitely more than just a BD player, slightly more expensive but worth every penny.
Get more detail about LG BD 390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player.
No comments:
Post a Comment