LG BD670 3D Blu-ray Disc player

Wolf in sheep's clothing?

Sat 1 Oct 2011 // 08:00 UTC

Disc jockey

Disc playback quality can be considered excellent for the price. Regular 2D Blu-rays exhibit supreme sharpness, with vibrant colour fidelity and no overt artefacts. 3D discs, including DIY AVCHD platters, perform equally well.

The BD670 also does a perfectly respectable job of deinterlacing DVD, with only minor jaggies evident. This is good news if you have a large legacy disc collection.

Not a shabby DVD player, either

The catch is that disc loading speeds are nothing to write home about. My standard ‘heavy’ load, Goldfinger, took 66 seconds to get from tray to the 007 logo - anything over a minute officially rates as slow in my book - but simpler fare does fine. Lou Reed’s Java-lite Berlin was ready to rock in a respectable 29 seconds.

The LG's audio performance is adequate. Remember, by pouring DTS HD MA and Dolby TrueHD out of the player as a bitstream, audio quality is largely dictated by the DACs and electronics in your AV receiver. Those routing sound straight to a TV through the BD670's sole HDMI port have nothing to be concerned about.

The jack pack

As a CD player, the BD670 is totally generic. However, I do like the player’s presentation: when you spin a disc, the deck draws album art from the Gracenote database.

Verdict

The BD670 is yet another ridiculously well-equipped mass-market Blu-ray player. Provided you can live with its scarecrow aesthetics, there’s plenty of entertainment to be had. Its UI is brilliantly simple and its IPTV offerings generous. I could have done with a second USB input, to address the BD Live memory problem, but its broad multimedia file support goes someway to compensating. The BD670 is a dark horse, and worth a ride. ®