LG BP620 3-D BLU-RAY PLAYER (August 2012 Home Theater magazine review)
The LG BP620 is LG’s top of the line Blu-ray player for 2012 (unless a better model is released in the 4th quarter of 2012). The list price of the LG BP620 is only $150 and includes built in WI-FI. The Home Theater magazine review incorrectly says at the top of page 56 “No additional memory needed for BD-Live.” Looking at the BP620 manual online at the LG website it clearly mentions that a USB drive of at least 1GB or larger is required to use the BD-LIVE feature. In an ideal consumer friendly world all Blu-ray players should have at least 1GB of built in memory for BD-LIVE (4GB or more is ideal), but the reality is most Blu-ray players in 2012 still do not include built in memory for BD-LIVE. So consumers end up needing to purchase a USB memory stick if they want to access the BD-LIVE bonus features on the LG BP620. One negative feature about the LG BP620 is that it only has one USB 2.0 interface in the front and no rear USB 2.0 interface. So consumers that want to use BD-LIVE are required to connect the USB drive in the front of the Blu-ray player which does not look as good cosmetically. Panasonic on many of their Blu-ray players uses a SDHC slot in the front which looks much better cosmetically.
The LG BP620 does not offer any 480i component video output for older SD displays with component video inputs but it does offer 480i composite video for legacy SD displays.
So the LG BP620 Blu-ray player according to the user manual supports both USB hard drives and USB flash drives for media playback. FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS are supported for media reading. Just like the OPPO BDP-93 Blu-ray player the LG BP620 supports NTFS for media reading only and not writing. So to use BD-LIVE on the LG BP620 the USB drive needs to be either formatted as FAT32 or FAT16. Panasonic Blu-ray players support exFAT but the LG and OPPO Blu-ray players do not support exFAT.
The big two negatives with the LG BP620 is how it handles internal decoding of Dolby TrueHD and the DVD playback performance. The LG BP620 bitstreams 7.1 PCM, 7.1 DTS-HD Master audio, and 7.1 Dolby TrueHD correctly over HDMI. Also when mixing PIP commentary tracks with 7.1 PCM and 7.1 DTS-HD Master audio the LG will properly output 7.1 PCM over HDMI. The problem is the LG BP620 was only designed to internally decode 5.1-7.1 Dolby TrueHD to 2.0 PCM over HDMI. So as a cost cutting feature the LG-BP620 does not fully support the internal decoding of Dolby TrueHD.
Another issue is that the LG BP620 picture quality when playing standard 480i DVD’s is poor when compared to an OPPO BDP-93 or a Panasonic Blu-ray player. Like all modern Blu-ray players, the LG BP620’s 1080p/24 output for native Blu-ray movies will match the OPPO BDP-93 in picture quality.
The following are select quotes from the August 2012 Home Theater magazine
(review located on pages 56-58).
“However, by design it will only output Dolby TrueHD tracks in PCM 2.0, that is, stereo. This is the first player I’ve seen that does this, and it’s a real head-scratcher, but LG has told us it meets Dolby requirements, and Dolby has confirmed this.”
“…and the BDP620’s output rivaled that of my reference Oppo BDP-93, which retails for $500.”
“Where the LG doesn’t measure up to the Oppo is in its DVD playback. While the BP620 did great in our benchmarks for HD video processing, its DVD performance is middling at best. It failed both the 3:2 and 2:2 cadence tests; failures at 2:2 are fairly common, but the 3:2 performance, which describes the player’s ability to convert film-based content for playback on video, is an important criterion. And the player’s upscaling of DVDs doesn’t come close to matching the Oppo’s upconverted image. This was very apparent in the DVD Gladiator, which looked extremely soft and fuzzy.”
“It’s clunky interface, middling DVD performance, economical build quality, and limitations with decoding multichannel Dolby TrueHD soudtracks aren’t anything to brag about.”
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LG BP620 3-D BLU-RAY PLAYER (August 2012 Home Theater magazine review)
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LG BP620 3-D BLU-RAY PLAYER (August 2012 Home Theater magazine review)
