LG BD370 review

LG's BD370 may be one of the cheapest Blu-ray players available, but it's hard to tell. For starters, it looks sleek and stylish and every bit as good as more expensive players. Then there's its list of features.

Both DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD sound formats are supported over the player's HDMI output. For people with older AV receivers there are optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs, although HD sound from Blu-ray movies has to be downsampled to be transmitted over these connections.

The BD370 supports lots of audio, video and image formats, including DivX and (uniquely here) the open-source Matroska video formats. It also had no trouble playing Blu-ray content recorded to DVDs, as well as AVCHD files from a camcorder recorded with or without menus.

The BD370 is incredibly simple to use. If you plug it directly into a TV or an AV amplifier with an HDMI cable, there's very little to configure. Setting up the network connection is just as easy, as you only need to plug an Ethernet cable into the player.

The player is controlled via the remote. Hit the corresponding button on the remote and you can access the Home screen, which gives you direct access to the Movie, Photo, Music and YouTube menus, as well as a Setup menu that lets you configure the player's resolution, aspect ratio and other configuration options.

The BD370 was one of the quickest players we've seen, and we found the onscreen display helpful during our chapter skip test, in which it performed admirably. It took just 39 seconds to get to the main menu of our Casino Royale test disc. In our DVD playback test, to check upscaling and noise reduction, the BD370 erred on the side of clarity, which resulted in more jagged lines but less ghosting.

There are a couple of flaws. The USB slot is situated on the front, behind a small flap. This means you'll need to have the flap open and a memory stick poking out to download BD Live content. This is unsightly and annoying. On the other hand, it's easily accessible if you just want to view files stored on a USB stick.

At this price, it's hard to see where LG has cut corners, it wins a Budget Buy awward.

Author: Barry de la Rosa