LG BD370 BLu-ray Player

Last year’s CES saw the Korean magnate LG’s new approach to BD viewing, a step from their previous BD 300 model, called the BD 370. It took some time to hit our time zone, but it’s here now, and gaining popularity. A good standalone Blu-ray Disc player is something that will always bear the brunt of being an alternative choice to the omnipresent PS3, but the former will always have certain advantages. Thus we see whether this particular Blu-ray player has what it takes…

Design and Features
Sounding repetitive is a customary risk when one is reviewing a recurring brand, but LG always has one thing going for them: superlative aesthetics. This is in their Scarlet TVs, and this BD player too. It’s minimally styled with a bare fa�ade, clad in shiny black plastic. The center patch is lead colored with circular silver power button. The rim lights up a brilliant blue when pushed, courtesy LED. The right side actually opens out in a flap , exposing some more operation buttons, while the left side folds out to expose the tray.

Build quality is good but not tank like, with a heavy enough black plastic tray. The back has a small connector window, with one HDMI 1.3 (this is necessary for sending DTS HD Master Audio bitstreams), one Ethernet port, a Component video out, the Digital audio siblings (co axial out and optical out) and last we have composite AV out.�

There are no individual analog audio outs, which means to avail Dolby True HD and DTS HD Master Audio, you will need a receiver that accepts and decodes HDMI audio, as this player can send the DTS HD Master and Dolby TrueHD audio streams through the HDMI. These Audio streams can also be converted to multichannel PCM if your receiver cannot decode raw Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio. BD live is supported, and so is YouTube. Watching YouTube on a TV screen is a nice feature if one has a good connection.