Video Asylum

Posted by oscar (A) on April 22, 2007 at 18:16:39

In Reply to: Anyone tried the LG Blue Ray\HD player? posted by Duilawyer on April 22, 2007 at 16:19:52:

I bit on it because of the itch for a high definition movie source player (I'd previously put a moratorium on DVD movie collection because most of the new stuff was starting to show up on Blu-ray/HD DVD). What sold me was a single player to play both formats in an undecided format war and because it supported uncompressed PCM and DTS HD playback via the analog outputs (later on I figured out DTS HD wasn't the same as DTS HD MA, but even 1536Kb DTS is a big improvement over anything on DVD; uncompressed PCM is ever better).

It's been able to play every Blu-Ray and HD-DVD I've thrown at it displaying very good PQ; I only have a 720p display but I did bring it over to a friends 126" 1080p display system and he was impressed enough to consider buying it (this was also the occasion we figured out Blu-Ray PQ is sometimes practically/always theoretically going to be able to support the best video/audio playback simply because of the 5/3rds better storage capacity.

There have been the rare "frozen frame" and lip-synch issues but this plagued every player I've read about. I also have a possible integration issue because uncompressed PCM occasionally causes my amps' protection circuits to kick in; my other LG buddies don't have this issue (I wouldn't normally expect a 400W/Ch Classe amp to quit very often).

OTOH, if you can wait a few months, Samsung will have a Universal player and maybe everyone else will soon support HDMI 1.3-compliant players which will provide full support for DTS HD MA and TrueHD which allegedly will be just as good as uncompressed PCM.