QUICK PICK REVIEW: MARCH 2009
LG BD300 Blu-Ray Player
LG’s BD300 made the news last fall for its ability to stream content from Netflix. But how does it handle the seemingly mundane task of playing back Bu-ray discs?
It would appear the “big thing” in next-generation media player technology is Web connectivity for Blu-ray players. With the blue laser format war a distant memory, manufacturers are trying to drum up sales for both BD players and discs.
While BD player sales have indeed picked up, potential buyers are still put off by the higher costs of both players and packaged media, compared to upscaling red laser players. So it’s pretty obvious that the BD format needs to morph into something more than just 1080p optical disc playback. And the BD300 is an attempt to do just that.
Figure 1. LG’s BD300 is nicely designed.
OUT OF THE BOX
The BD300 resembles most other current-model Blu-ray players. The front panel has a rich piano-gloss black finish with blue fluorescent indicators for operation. Two dark-gray buttons, located along the top edge of the front panel, control power and disc load/eject functions, while four smaller, round buttons operate disc navigation functions. You’ll also find a USB 2.0 jack on the front panel for viewing JPEG photos and playing back MP3 files.
In addition, there appears to be extra space for a larger BD drive, probably a recordable version. (There is a dummy panel just below the conventional BD tray.) I say that based on my recent shopping experiences in Japan, where every BD player I saw had record capability, Ethernet connections, and an internal hard disc drive.
The rear panel connections are straightforward and include analog component (YPbPr) video connections and an HDMI output jack. Digital audio streams can be extracted using either a Toslink optical or coaxial SPDIF connection. There are no discrete analog outputs for 5.1 or 7.1 channel Dolby or DTS soundtracks. (There are, however, stereo analog audio jacks, and even a composite video jack.)
You’ll also find a 100BaseT Ethernet jack, which is required to connect the player’s BD-Live and Netflix streaming capabilities. Note that this jack will NOT work with a wireless Ethernet adapter — you’ll need an 802.11 wireless bridge to make it work, or put up with that long Cat5 Ethernet cable running to wherever you have your router.
I liked the supplied remote control. Its button layout wasn’t cluttered and the keys were large enough for rapid operation. You may get confused, however, with the preponderance of same-sized buttons near the top of the remote that control everything from picture-in-picture to TV power, tray open/close, audio subtitles, angles, etc.
Figure 2. The rear panel connections are sparse, but adequate for most applications.
Figure 3. LG’s remote control has a user-friendly button layout — except for the top portion.
MENUS AND SETTINGS
The BD300 spins up fast, which is a refreshing break from some BD players I’ve tried. From power “on” to the main menu screen took all of 20 seconds. The player recognized a Blu-ray disc after loading in about six seconds, and showed me the anti-piracy warning screen in 15 seconds.
Once the movie pop-up menu appeared, it took an additional six seconds to start the program, in this case, the BBC’s Planet Earth documentary — just over 40 seconds in disc operations. That’s a far cry from earlier players, which took a minute or more to being playing any content after powering up.
More importantly, it has a super-simple user menu that scrolls horizontally across the screen, and not up and down. If a feature or mode is not connected, you won’t see that menu come up. If the feature is active or connected, then the menu icon becomes active.
The first menu choice is Movie, and all it does it take you directly to the film or video already loaded. That might seem unnecessary, but it does provide a return point if you have to stop a Blu-ray disc to make an adjustment to the system. Those tweaks are found in the Setup menu.
Here’s where you’ll find settings for output resolution. For analog component video, your choices are 480i/p, 720p, and 1080i, while 1080p is available only through the HDMI port. You can also toggle between 24p or 60p frame rates. (Copy-protected discs will only output 480i through analog video connections with the HDMI port connected, and are limited to 480p playback with no HDMI connection.)
Note that most if not all of these adjustments are made automatically through the HDMI port, which determines the optimum resolution and frame rate from your connected HDTV, using Electronic Display Identification Data (EDID). So if you have the latest 1080p LCD or plasma TV that supports 24-frame playback, you may need to do nothing more than connect the HDMI cable and power up.
You can also select HDMI color formats, in case you’re driving a PC monitor with the BD300. Choose YPbPr for conventional TVs, or RGB for DVI inputs. Otherwise, you won’t see colors reproduced correctly.
In the Audio menu, you can chose between HDMI or SPDIF digital audio output, PCM stereo or multi-channel playback, DTS re-encoding through an external AV receiver, and pass-through mode for sending uncompressed bitstreams including Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD to an AV receiver. The sampling frequency can be set to one of three levels — 48 kHz, 96 kHz, or 192 kHz (full bit rate).
Figure 4. Add an Ethernet connection, and you can stream videos and
movies from Netflix
directly to the BD300 for playback.
IN OPERATION
I cut right to the chase and connected the BD300 to Pioneer’s PRO-111FD 50-inch 1080p KURO plasma TV, using Blu-ray pressings of The Dark Knight and Planet Earth to judge the quality of the BD300’s 1080p image processing. I also loaded up the Realta HQV BD test pattern disc to see if the BD300 handles 1080p processing correctly, and even put the older Realta HQV red laser DVD in the tray to check on upconverted image quality.
The good news? All of these discs loaded quickly and navigated smoothly. The bad news? The BD300 doesn’t fully process 1080i content by weaving — it “bobs” sequential 1080p frames, resulting in plenty of flicker on both the HQV Video Resolution and Film Resolution loss tests. This was verified by selecting Performance (non-film processing) mode on the Pioneer and toggling between 1080p/60 and 1080p/24 playback from the BD300.
That fact alone would be enough not to recommend this player, considering how inexpensive it has become to include full 1080p processing in both TVs and optical disc players. Eventually, I got things to work right by selecting the BD300’s 1080i output setting, and having the PRO-111FD do the interlaced-to-progressive-scan and 3:2 conversions in Pure or Movie modes, resulting in smooth-as-silk test patterns with zero jitter.
I was also disappointed with the quality of deinterlacing on the BD300, as evidenced both by the blue and red laser pressings of the Realta HQV test disk. The rotating “jaggies” test pattern revealed plenty of line artifacts with 480i and 1080i sources that only the Pioneer’s internal video processing could clean up.
Aside from this problem, both test discs showed well on the Pioneer; in particular, The Dark Knight, which has plenty of low-level, high-key nighttime scenes that could mangle shadow detail. Not a problem for the BD300, as the underground chase scene and the climatic battle above the ferry both held up beautifully.
For further grayscale testing, I spun up the Ice Worlds chapter from Planet Earth, which has to be one of the most visually stunning HD programs ever assembled. Ice Worlds is a great way to see if your display has its gamma set correctly, or has gone into compression with high-luminance content. I could easily see all the detail in the various glaciers, icebergs, and even polar bears dashing across the snow, yet detail in deep shadows was still evident.
As for the Netflix feature, it is very easy to use. Plug in your Ethernet connection and the BD300 will automatically select Dynamic (DHCP) IP addressing with your router or hub. That takes but a few seconds, and once it’s done, you simply navigate to the Netflix menu option, and you’re on-line, ready to download movies directly to the player.
Since this is a streaming operation, where is the video file stored during playback? Good question, and one that’s not easily answered by reading the menu. What you’ll need to do is plug in a flash memory drive to the front panel USB port. For storage capacity, the rule of thumb is about 3 GB for every hour of SD video using MPEG compression, and 9 GB per hour of HD using MPEG2. For MPEG4 or Windows Media, you can cut those numbers by half — 1.5 GB for SD, and 4.5 GB for HD.
One caveat: Unless you have lots of bandwidth and a very fast Internet connection, plan
on watching mostly standard-definition video using this connection. As a rule (no matter what
compression algorithm is used), you’ll need about 3x the SD streaming rate to load HD content.
While 3 to 4 MB/s is feasible with current implementations of broadband cable or FiOS service,
sustained bit rates of 9 to 12 Mb/s are dicey.
