Philips BDP5200 3D Blu-Ray Player Review

During the festive season, one usually wants to upgrade their electronics to the latest technologies. Manufacturers in turn, also offer these electronics at discounted prices or as a bundle to sort all your purchasing needs in one go. Philips is one such manufacturer who have come up with an HDTV, 3D Blu-ray player and wireless keyboard combination that could attract consumers during the festive month. Today, we will be looking at the BDP5200 3D Blu-ray player, which boasts of some impressive features such as Internet TV capabilities, DivX playback, USB connectivity as well as full HD 3D Blu-ray playback. Read on to know if this player is worth your money.

Can play various file formats

Design and Build Quality
The Philips BDP5200 is a stylish looking player and has a black finish with a touch of grey. The top panel of the player is made of metal with a slight texture on it. Like with most of the players, the top panel has a black finish, too. The front panel also has a glossy black finish and only features the Philips branding in the centre and the USB port. Apart from the logo on the front, the panel features the front loading tray that slides out easily. Below the front panel, there is a ridge where the controls for the player lie. These are pretty standard connections found on most DVD or Blu-ray players and are the on/ off button, eject, play and pause.

The other I/O options for the player are located on the rear. These connectivity options include HDMI, composite video output, analog ports, an SD/SDHC card slot and an Ethernet port. All these ports are placed well. The remote control that comes with this player looks simple and is made of plastic. An appealing thing about this controller is that it is not cluttered with a lot of buttons. The buttons are made of rubber and are spaced well. It is also light in weight, which works in its favor.

Light weight remote control

All in all, the design of this player is minimalistic, yet stylish. With the front panel doubling up as a matrix display, Philips have done well to add to the looks of this player. As far as the build quality is concerned, it feels sturdy, owing to the metallic top panel.

Features
The BDP5200 is pretty rich in features and the main feature is its ability to playback full HD 3D Blu-rays. This is a pretty amazing capability and there are only a handful of manufacturers in the market that have released players that support this feature. Apart from this 3D Blu-ray playback, the player also features highlighted features such as Internet video playback, Dolby TruHD, as well as USB 2.0 connectivity.

Having a feature like 3D playback is always a good one in a time like ours where many products come with 3D properties. With 3D Blu-rays becoming increasingly popular in the market having a 3D capable Blu-ray player keeps you up-to-date on the latest technology in the market. However, to view 3D content one would also require a television with 3D capabilities, as well as 3D Blu-ray discs.

Slim in size

Internet video capability is another nifty feature this player has. If one is using a television without Smart TV functionalities they can just hook up this player and stream Internet videos by merely attaching a LAN cable to the Ethernet port. The BDP5200 has a single USB slot located at the front. This makes it easy to quickly swap between various hard drives using the plug and play feature. The player can read both NTFS drives, as well as FAT32 drives. This is a feature we found quite interesting as it helped increase the amount of storage capacity available.

The interface of this player is minimal looking and does not have any flashy images across the screen. Despite the interface not having any frills, it is not unpleasant to look at. One can get used to navigating through the menus within a matter of minutes. The player can support different file formats such as MKV, H.264, MPEG2, XviD, AVCHD, WMV, etc. making it able to play most of the popular file formats on the fly. Overall, the features of this 3D Blu-ray player are pretty impressive

Performance
The performance of this player was tested by connecting it to Philips 42-inch LED LCD TV, the 42PFL6556.  We ran our test Blu-ray of ‘The Last Samurai’ and we were really pleased with the results. The colours appeared natural with the skin tones appearing as they should. There was minimal amount of noise in the images onscreen and this was really good.

Rear connectors are well spaced

Apart from the Blu-ray, we connected a 500GB NTFS drive and played back a number of video clips across different file formats. The ability to play MKV and M2TS files really impressed us. As with the Blu-ray disk, video playback through the external hard disk drive was impressive. The overall user experience, while watching movies through the USB drive was really great. The interface being simple to navigate through added to the experience of this player. The remote control is pretty responsive as well and one does not need to direct it exactly at a TV to get the desired function to work. We were really pleased with its performance and were hard pressed to find any flaws with the player.

Stylish looking Blu-ray player

Verdict
The selling price of the Philips BDP5200 3D Blu-ray player in India is Rs.12,990. The player is stylish and has a decent build quality as well. The features of this player are really good, with it having the ability to playback 3D Blu-rays. This player is sold as a bundle as well as separately. If one is willing to pay the amount for this player, to get the optimum results they should have a 3D capable television as well. With Internet capabilities, the ability to read various file formats and an incredibly easy user interface, one should definitely consider this player.