Buy LG BD 390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player

I like this player overall, but there were some issues in a few areas. This is my first blu-ray player, so I'm not sure how many problems were due to the player, or were due to the blu-ray disc authoring.

My setup: HDMI out from player to Samsung 1080p TV, and coaxial digital audio output to a 10-year old Yamaha RX-V2095 A/V amplifier. Player configured to access my home network and internet via a Netgear wireless-G router.

I also tried connecting the composite video output of the player to the video aux input of the A/V amp. This works, but the player does not output the correct aspect ratio for a standard definition TV - the picture is somewhat squeezed horizontally (not a big deal).

The remote control is awful. The buttons are small, the button labels are small and dim. By comparison, the Samsung TV's remote is wonderful - big clear black text on big white buttons. LG should certainly redesign their remote.

I've played the following blu-ray discs on this player so far: Bladerunner, The Fifth Element, 2001 Space Oddyssey, and Star Trek (original series) seasons 1 and 2. Picture quality for HD features is wonderful on my Samsung (once I turned off its dynamic contrast function, but that's another story).

Disc load time is reasonable, less than 10 seconds. Some discs take longer than others, for example, the Star Trek season 2 discs all have BD-live features, so when the disc first loads, the player connects to the internet and download updates; this adds about 10-20 seconds of delay. Kind of annoying, but this is the disc's fault, not the player's.

All but the Star Trek discs played flawlessly. The Star Trek discs have 'seamless' branching between the old visual effects and the new CGI effects. Whenever a branch point is reached, the little camera icon appears in the upper right corner. This may be the fault of the disc authoring, but I found it annoying that I couldn't turn off the display of this icon - it appears quite often in the course of one 50-minute episode. Worse than this, once in a long while the audio would cut out for up to a second just after a branch point, and when it came back, it was out of sync with the video (both the HDMI audio to the TV, and the coaxial digital audio to the amp). I could fix this by scanning backwards briefly then resuming playback - the audio would snap back into sync.

The BD-live features mostly worked OK. When going into a video download screen, there was a choice of several videos that could be downloaded. The downloads worked fine and the videos played fine. However, there was no way that I could find to go back to the disc menu. Both the menu return button and the disc menu button would do nothing. The only way to exit was to hit the HOME button, which unloads the disc. Very annoying, but this may be due to faulty disc authoring.

The YouTube interface works well (I did not try the CinemaNow, NetFlix, or Vudu interfaces). It would be nice if you could plug in a standard computer keyboard into the player's USB port for quicker entry of search strings.

I also tried playing DVD-R video discs that I authored and burned on my Mac. This works fine. The player also plays all the mpeg4 video clips (HD and SD) that I created on my Mac. I can easily stream wirelessly the .mp4 files from my old windows PC to the player. However, the 1080i files (at 8 Mbits/sec) are a bit too much for my router. The SD clips (at 1.5-2.0 Mbits/sec) stream with no hiccups. To play the HD videos, I simply put them on a thumb drive, and plug that into the player. Works fine.

In regard to playing DVD video, the player upconverts to 1080p, However, sometimes there were minor little artifacts in the video, as if the player's de-interlace function was failing for certain kinds of motion. I'm probably too picky, since my day job involves critical observation of HD video, so I'm used to much better upconversion performance.

I also used the player to display jpeg pictures on the thumb drive. The player displays them with out problems, but I don't like the picture quality at all. The player must be using a very simple scaling method, because fine detail in the pictures looks very aliased. I think they tried too hard to make it sharp. My Samsung TV can also display jpegs from a thumb drive, and they look a whole lot better this way.

Finally, one last issue with the player - when left idle for several minutes, it turns itself off!

I've had the player for a little over a month, and there have been two firmware updates in that time. The last update added the Vudu interface, but didn't fix any of the problems. Hopefully a future firmware update will fix the seamless branch audio sync issue.
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