One of the biggest news items to emerge from last year's Consumer Electronics Show was LG's announcement of a dual-format deck that could play both Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs. We subsequently got our hands on that player, the BH100 Super Multi Blue, and we found it an intriguing but frustratingly incomplete solution. Among the player's shortcomings was an inability to display the onscreen menus of HD DVDs.

The Short Form

Price $999 / us.lge.com / 800-243-0000

Snapshot

Although it comes up short on some audio features, LG's new do-it-all player provides reliable handling and high-quality video.

Plus

•Consistently sharp pictures from HD DVD, Blu-ray, and DVD discs •Smooth, glitch-free operation •Supports both HDi and BD-Java interactivity •Eliminates need for two separate high-def disc players

Minus

•Dolby TrueHD decoding limited to 2 channels •No user-selectable 1080p/24 video output option

Key Features

•6-source/6-zone system •Expandable to 30 listening zones •60-watt per channel amplifier •Four different control options •Modular, card-based architecture •XM, Sirius, AM/FM, or all three •iPod integration •GXR2: 17.4 x 5.8 x 18 in; 54 lb

Scan forward a year to LG's BH200 ($999), with the more abbreviated nickname of Super Blu. Not only does this dual-format machine cost a few hundred bucks less than its predecessor, it's a superior unit on a number of levels. Among the most notable advancements is full support for the HD DVD format's HDi interactivity. HD DVD onscreen menus can be displayed and navigated with no limitations, and the player has an Ethernet port to plug into a home network and access Internet-based interactive features on discs. As for Blu-ray, the BH200 is currently specified as a BD-Rom Profile 1.0 player, although its hardware supports BD-Rom Profile 1.1, and a firmware upgrade that LG plans to release in early 2008 should elevate it to that status. (Among the key differences between the two profiles is the addition of secondary audio and video decoders in 1.1 that allow features like video picture-in-picture and audio commentaries to run concurrently with main movie playback.)

Moving on to the nuts-and-bolts features, the player passes 1080p/60 video signals through an HDMI 1.3 connection, and it can also upconvert regular DVDs to that format. LG's manual suggests that the player also supports 1080p/24 video output. Strangely, there's no option to select that format in the video setup menu, although a company rep I spoke with said the feature should be enabled automatically when the player obtains the display's EDID (Extended display identification data) via an HDMI connection. But the player's audio capabilities, unfortunately, aren't much advanced over those of the BH100. The new deck supports output of multichannel PCM soundtracks on discs via its HDMI connection, but built-in decoding of lossless Dolby TrueHD soundtracks is limited to 2 channels, and it can only extract the core 1.5-Mbps DTS track from DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks. On a positive note, it plays standard CDs — a basic function that LG's previous Super player lacked.

Viewed head-on, the BH200 looks like any other high-def disc player I've had in recently, with an all-black façade and a row of transport controls. And there's also a USB port under a flip-up panel for plugging in a flash drive loaded with JPEG photos or MP3 and WMA music files. You get HDMI, component video, and a regular composite-video connection, but no S-video jack. Audio outputs are limited to optical digital and stereo analog; there's neither a coaxial digital output nor multichannel analog outputs, both of which are provided on Samsung's similarly priced BD-UP5000 Duo HD player. The Ethernet jack is a big plus, both for compatibility with HD DVD and future Blu-ray interactive software and for downloading firmware updates.

LG's sizable remote control lacks backlighting, but its keypad has a clean layout, with frequently used buttons all orbiting around the menu-navigation buttons at its center. A control labeled "Resolution" sits at the bottom, close to one labeled "Video PIP." The first can be used to switch the resolution of the video output signal when the player is in Stop mode without wading through setup menus. And the second control will activate video picture-in-picture on any future Blu-ray Discs supporting that feature.

Setup
Setting up the BH200 was painless and glitch-free — a first in my experience with Blu-ray players. It worked smoothly with the Anthem AVM50 preamp/processor that I used for testing, and I encountered no machine freeze-ups or disc incompatibilities — another first. I initially configured a Pioneer 1080p plasma TV to display 1080p/24 signals from the LG, but the player would only deliver 1080p/60 when either the Auto or 1080p resolution modes were selected from its Display menu. And the same thing happened when I plugged the player into a 1080p/24-friendly Sony SXRD front projector. Not a disaster exactly, but I'd still prefer having a menu-selectable option to guarantee 1080p/24 video output irrespective of the EDID handshake described earlier.

There are two video modes you can choose on the LG: Default and User. With User selected, you can tweak brightness, contrast, sharpness, and color (the player puts out a still pic of grinning, happy children for you to make adjustments with), as well as change the individual levels of the primary and secondary colors. And there's also a handful of noise reduction options, including a White Noise Reduction mode that proved very effective in cleaning up grainy pictures. (The Block NR option also worked well, but Mosquito NR made pictures look seriously fuzzy.)

The LG's Audio setup menu proved straightforward. With the player hooked up to my preamp via an HDMI connection, I selected the PCM Multi-Ch option, which delivers both multichannel PCM soundtracks on discs and regular Dolby Digital/DTS soundtracks as 6-channel PCM over an HDMI link. Other options in the Audio Setup menu include DTS re-encode (which does what its name suggests, sending out DTS and Dolby Digital soundtracks as a DTS bitstream) and Primary Pass-Thru. The latter option is meant for setups where you want to send a Dolby Digital or DTS bitstream output to an external processor or receiver for decoding. LG's manual hints that this option should also work for sending out a lossless multichannel Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio bitstream via HDMI, but the same LG rep I queried before confirmed that this wasn't the case (yet another item to look out for in that forthcoming firmware upgrade).

Performance
The BH200 proved to be a serious speed demon. Power-up time — from when I initially hit the Power button to when the disc tray responded to an Open command — took a mere 30 seconds, and I had to twiddle my thumbs for only 25 seconds more before the FBI warning showed up onscreen after loading a disc. The player also offers remarkably smooth fast-forward and reverse scanning of DVDs, although the same fast, fluid performance doesn't extend to HD DVD and Blu-ray. As with other high-def disc players I've tested, resuming playback after stopping the disc works only for Blu-ray and DVD titles. With HD DVDs, you need to start from the beginning when resuming play from a full stop —an apparent limitation of the format.

Ideally, you'd expect a dual-format player to provide equally good picture quality with both Blu-ray and HD DVD. This was very much the case with the BH200: All high-def discs that I flipped into the player's tray looked wonderfully sharp and clean on my 1080p-rez plasma TV. Both high-def discs and regular DVDs also looked very crisp when I used the player's component-video output to connect to the TV — something that I can't say for every high-def disc player I've handled.

For most of my testing, I left the player set to its Default video mode, which uses Qdeo video processing to deinterlace and scale the standard 480i-rez video on regular DVD up to 1080p resolution. I'd never heard of Qdeo before, but the LG's upconversion performance left a positive impression: It passed the full set of tests contained on the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark discs, and the DVD movies I watched on the player also looked uniformly clean and artifact-free. I'm glad to see LG taking DVD picture quality seriously. The BH200's attention to this detail makes it a truly universal player.

Bottom Line
LG's BH200 Super Blu player is the third machine I've tested in the past year that's capable of spinning both Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs. And with backers of both formats sticking to their guns, it's a safe bet that we'll see a few more of these decks in the future. The BH200's key advantages include strong video performance with all manner of discs and reliable, glitch-free operation. Where the LG comes up short is in its output connections (which seem limited against those of Samsung's Duo HD player), its lack of a menu-selectable 1080p/24 video output, and its limited-to-nonexistent support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. But, as with other Blu-ray and HD DVD players, the promise of a firmware update is always around the corner, and I was told that LG is considering both the 1080p/24 output issue and full multichannel support for the advanced audio formats. If and when these upgrades come to pass, the BH200 will be the high-def disc player to beat.

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