LG BD660 DVD Player (Dolby Digital Plus / True HD)

Having been overcome by the irresistible siren-song of new shiny things I finally wore down the resistance of my more sensible other half and took the plunge to upgrade from our perfectly good three year old 37" Samsung LCD telly and ancient, though excellent, Toshiba DVD player. After much exhaustive research, the TV I fell for was a 42" LG LCD (the 42LK540U) and, as coincidence would have it, the Blu-ray player that finally seduced me was the LG BD660.

All of the other Blu-ray players seemed to have something against them, including poor DVD upscaling, noisy operation and price. This unit suffers none of these ills. Given that we have hundreds of DVDs, the quality of upscaling to full 1080p was an important consideration and we were not disappointed; obviously the quality of the upscaling depends on the quality of the DVD; for example Source Code is a bit grainy while Lord of the Rings is near Blu-ray quality, but all of the DVD's we've watched so far have been as good as or better than watching on the old DVD player. The player whirs and clunks quietly to itself when a disk is first inserted, but after that there is no drive noise at all. Blu-ray playback is phenomenal. We were a little sceptical about whether we would be able to see the difference between DVD and Blu-ray with our aging eyes, but the difference is incredible; it's like seeing the first DVD after being used to VHS. The only Blu-ray we have so far is the Avatar Collector's edition and it is noticeably more crisp (edges you could shave with!) and the colour depth and sound quality are superb; our aging but brilliant separate AV amp presented us with near cinema DTS quality via the optical connection (although as our amp only has one optical input (used by the satellite decoder) we needed an optical-to-coaxial converter).

We haven't got it connected to the broadband router but I downloaded the latest firmware onto a USB stick and upgraded the player with no problem. If you want a quality player to watch DVD and Blu-ray disk then look no further; I can't comment on all of the gimmicky networky & file compatibility stuff - I don't need it so don't care.

I want to agree with the review before mine and add more comments about the networking. I don't use Windows on my computer but Linux. I added Windows networking (samba) to my Linux box and the player found it as expected. The play back of media was excellent for most video formats I tried. Playing MP3s was superb! The up-scaling to 5.1 sound was beautiful!
(Note: Do go into the players settings and change the sound settings to Pass-Thru)

What surprised me though was that it also found my MythTV (television recording) software also and allowed me to play its recorded TV shows. It could show my programs by Title, Genre, Date, Channel and Group. Play back was excellent and convenient using the remote. An extremely pleasant and helpful unexpected feature!!

The Youtube feature was fun and usable. The other things were of little use to me.