It was finally time to get a Blue Ray DVD player after the old standard DVD player broke. Since we have Netflix, I decided to get a player with streaming capability built in. This left me with 2 choices: Samsung and LG. After some research, it seemed the LG had overall higher ratings so I ordered the BD390 (I wanted wireless internet access) and a couple of HDMI cables.
I installed the player, popped in a regular DVD and proceeded to see a great up-converted picture...with a lot of "hot" pixels of various colors around the screen. After changing from HDMI to Component output without a difference in the hot pixels, we continued to watch the DVD and noticed that over time the number of hot pixels decreased. I wanted to see if they were reproducible, so on a whim I stepped through the frames and noticed that every 12th frame was devoid of the pixels, and the other 11 had the problem. The problem was also worse in dark areas and almost not noticeable in light areas of the image. I set up the wireless network access (WPA)with no problem and within minutes was streaming Netflix. The Netflix stream also had the hot pixel problem. The next day, I tried it again, and sure enough, when the unit was cold the problem appeared and mostly disappeared after an hour or so. I figured it was a hardware defect and returned the unit. Amazon had the UPS guy pick it up, and since I happened to be home it was no problem. Amazon immediately sent me another unit and it arrived quickly (Thanx Amazon!)
This time the pixels were non-existant and the upconverted DVD image was superb. During this time I bought a $50 standard DVD player (didn't know how long the 2nd delivery would take) from a local warehouse and its upconversion was no where near as good, which makes sense, given the cost factor.
I then received a blueray DVD from netflix and what a picture!
There was one other problem with SPDIF audio which I had been using with my Pioneer receiver for years with the last 2 DVD players (Hitachi & Phillips). For some reason the optical connection didn't work, so I switched to coax and got the 5.1 decoded audio I wanted.
The quality of the Netflix streamed image is remarkably good, given our 2.5 Mb DSL download speed, and we watch a streamed movie almost every night.
The USB connector on the front is handy, and let us watch some pictures from a thumb drive without having to burn optical media.
We're extremely pleased with this unit and knocked off one star for the first defective unit and SPDIF incompatability.Get more detail about LG BD 390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player.
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