Order LG BD 390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player

I'm always suspicious of online reviews that say, "I had XXX brand and it was terrible, this brand YYY is great", but I'm going to write one anyway. It is the principle context of my review, and therefore necessitates review of the machine(s) this LG is being compared to.

I started into Blu-ray a little less than two years ago with a Sony BDP-S300, a first-generation player. It was GLACIALLY slow to load disks - the player would routinely take MINUTES from the time a disk was inserted to the time you could start controlling it and watching the movie. It was also finicky about what it would play, unable to play at all a small portion of my all-official-release disk collection. I updated firmware several times, no improvement at all.

Reviews made it sound like the machine was at least as good as all others, and the BDP-S350 which followed it not much better, so we sucked it up for well over a year. Then the Sony BDP-S360 was released, and reviews made it sound like it was blazingly-fast, so I bought one.

It is noticeably faster, but still groaningly slow. It takes well over a minute to load many of our disks, and still refuses to play a few disks. But now, after three months, it won't play Blu-ray disks AT ALL! It plays DVDs without complaint, but says "can't operate this disk" when any Blu-ray is inserted! I've upgraded firmware, no improvement. I came to write this review because it irks me that Sony, the originators of Blu-ray, have sucked me into buying TWO dismal Blu-ray players!

So, long time getting to this, but I bought the LG a few weeks ago and absolutely LOVE it! First and foremost for me, it loads and plays Blu-ray disks almost as quickly as my old DVD player did... night and day compared to the Sony! It has not choked on ANY disk tried in it, including disks the Sonys could not digest. Its video quality is at least as good as the Sony's - I had fallen for Sony's claims that Sony players would look better on my Sony TV, but that's utter nonsense. It does a BETTER job of upgrading our DVDs for 1080p display, and Blu-rays look just as good. It has a terrific interface, with a wonderfully simple, clear on-screen menu. And it has a well-thought-out remote that HAS an eject button, the Sonys inexplicably do not.

When plugged into the network, it does great things too (some of these also done by the Sony). When I turned it on one day it told me a firmware update was available, and with a couple of clicks and a couple of minutes it was updated. YouTube is prominently featured on the main menu, with a click or two we are watching YouTube videos. And the player comes with software that can be loaded onto any computer on the network, and that computer becomes a server for pictures and video for the TV. It works GREAT - everything about this machine so far works GREAT!

So far my only complaint may not be the player's fault. I have told the machine in setup that we do NOT want disks to be able to access the internet and download advertising and new trailers to show us. (Note to manufacturers and would-be advertisers: we will NEVER permit this intrusion and won't buy any player that doesn't let us disable disk-to-network access.) On a few disks on the LG it has taken noticeably longer to load before displaying a warning that our player cannot connect to the network. Whether this is an issue with programming on the disk or in the player I don't know. We didn't see this message or notice extra delay with the Sony, maybe because we didn't have it on a full-time network connection. Also, the 10-15 second delay I'm talking about would not have been noticeable in Sony's already-very-lengthy load times.Get more detail about LG BD 390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player.