LG BD350 Blu-Ray DVD Player

A. J. Thomson

at 10:37 pm

A very sleek blu-ray player, takes up hardly any space, a shave under 40mm high. Quick to start up and play blu-ray discs (some other makes take quite a while to start playing blu-rays). It will upscale DVDs to 1080p with good results, and is multi-region for DVDs (well mine is anyway :-). Plays lots of media – DVD/CD/USB stick. Even plays DivX, _but_ only ones that are 720×576 or less (I downloaded 720p and 1080p HD DivX files but the player refuses to play them with the ‘resolution greater than 720×576′ message – this with latest firmware too). Sound goes via HDMI, there’s an SPDIF coax out too, but no optical. Via HDMI or SPDIF you can choose for the audio stream to be passed through, or sent as stereo pcm/pcm-multi-channel, or will re-encode to DTS (if your A/V amp supports DTS/Dobly Digital, just use pass through). Watched planet earth on blu-ray and the picture is outstanding.

There’s a USB socket at the front of the unit, where you can plug in USB sticks/hard drives and play the media (movies/music/photos) from them.

There is no ethernet port on the back of the box, but this is no great loss – the only thing it would be of use for me is playing content from a NAS drive, but I’m not even sure those blu-ray players with an ethernet port allow that anyway. BD-Live is just a gimmick to me, so I’m not scoring it down for no ethernet.

Note there is no HDMI cable provided, but you never get them on any player at this price range.

All in all, a good blu-ray player that does the job well, and excellent value (esp from richer sounds), so 5* from me.

Rating: 5 / 5

G. Palmer

at 1:23 am

This seems to do everything I had hoped my previous (Sharp BDHP-20H … which is now in the bin!) would do – straight out of the box. Installation is simplicity itself, disc load time is slick, on screen menu is simple and fast to use and the picture quality is undoubtedly better than the Sharp (and that’s to a Sharp Aquos 42″ TV). Film sound quality is at least as good (through an Onkyo AV receiver) but music CD playback is considerably better in both quality and accuracy. So far I have experienced none of the gremlins I suffered for 2 years on the Sharp machine. I have also downloaded the latest firmware from the LG website and loading that was simplicity itself. For under £100 it is hard to know how you can go wrong … particularly when Sharp want £50 to even send someone to look at the old one! It undoubtedley lacks the quality look and feel of the Sharp box (or Sony for that matter) both the unit and the remote feel ‘budget’ in comparison … but what does that matter when it does what it does so well and sits hidden in a cabinet anyway.
Rating: 5 / 5