- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 15 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"ignore Cnet's review; this is a great machine!"
Pros: excellent HD audio support, great SD upscaling with Qdeo processor, Profile 1.1 compliant
Cons: still a few audio/video dropouts on problem disks
Summary: First and foremost, I must implore you to ignore Cnet's review. Before the latest firmware update, the machine had a lot of glitches but it was never as bad as they made it sound. And their statement about a dual format player no longer being relevant is ignorant at best and willfully shortsighted at worst. Anyone with a fair amount of HD DVD movies in their collection will find a dual format player very appealing.
With the latest official firmware and driver from LG (released in April, a beta version was temporarily posted in March) each and every one of Cnet's major complaints have been fixed. The BH200 now supports internal decoding of multichannel Dolby Digital, DTS, DD+, and Dolby TrueHD and will decode the core (1.5 mbps) audio in a DTS-HD/MA track. Perhaps even more importantly, it now bitstreams all the new HD and/or lossless audio codecs including DD+, TrueHD, DTS-HD, and DTS-HD Master Audio via HDMI to a compatible receiver in up to 7.1 channels. This is something very few standalone HD DVD or Blu-ray players can claim. The green line overscan issue with SD DVD's has also been fixed and 1080p/24 output has been implemented as has network updating. Rounding out the features that the new firmware provided is Blu-ray Profile 1.1 (aka Bonus View) support. Again, most standalone Blu-rays players still can't make this claim.
The Qdeo video processing is excellent and provides upscaling that is equal to, or perhaps even better than, the HQV chip in the Toshiba HD-XA2 and Samsung 5000 dual format player. The BH200 is whisper quiet and features faster loading times on both HD DVD and Blu-ray than I've seen on any player other than the PS3. HDi support for HD DVD menus and "in movie experience" features is very good and quite stable. BD-Java on Blu-ray also seems very stable and relatively speedy.
All in all, there are only a few nitpicks I have with the machine. It still suffers from a few buggy issues on certain disks but no more than most any other HD player on the market. And yes, there is still the occasional audio or video dropout but they last less than a second, are few and far in between, and are almost never repeatable.
With the latest firmware LG has made good on all the promise of the BH200 and continues to support the HD DVD format and provide excellent customer service. I'd suggest you check out the thread dedicated to this player on the AVS forums. There are tons of details, helpful hints, and MANY other users who are just as happy with their machine as I am.
I'd recommend the BH200 to anyone, without hesitation, and once again encourage you to ignore Cnet's incomplete and out of date review.
-C.
LG BH200:
