LG BD370 - Blu-ray and MKV in one place?
Of course, such a player needs to be tested "live" under suitable conditions, so we took LG's novelty in the company of a Samsung PS-A557 full HD plasma and an Onkyo TX-SR875 A/V amplifier to show what it can really do. We received three BR releases for the player for testing — 300, Casino Royal, The Dark Knight — from which we mostly skinned the last two.
After the connection — which for now only meant the correct placement of the HDMI and power cable — the player and display found each other, and the fun could begin. Next, we pressed the "Home" button on the remote control, which, after a bit of thought, brought up the main menu, where we wanted to fine-tune the image. To our greatest astonishment, the player does not offer any kind of option in this direction (see the previous page), which unfortunately did not please us. We are happy that we had no problems with the color scheme, the settings are correct by default - the electronics are probably trying to reproduce what is on the disc. (Of course, here we could say that the parameters should be set on the display - which answer is only half correct.) After that, we quickly made the necessary basic settings - 1080p/24 Hz, RGB - and the cinema could start.
To begin with, we took the seats and watched Casino Royale in English LPCM — lossless compressed (7.1, 48 kHz, 16 bit) — sound. Our choice was not accidental - for two reasons: at the beginning, this Sony Pictures production was given as a gift with many players, and - more precisely, mainly because of this - it entered the public consciousness as a reference material due to its excellent sound and image quality. The effect was not lost, we had a very impressive experience: excellent resolution, (almost) completely smooth motion tracking, impeccable color fidelity - in other words, everything was fine in terms of the visual experience. Our ears were also pampered, as the high-resolution multi-channel audio track was free of any loudness, we were rewarded with a dynamic, balanced and spatially uniform sound, which certainly seemed much more fluid than "plain" Dolby Digital 5.1.
Have a nice time there…
In the meantime, it got completely dark, so we put ourselves away for the next day. By that time, we had already changed the disc, and the (tragic) classic The Dark Knight was now in the player. We immediately switched to Dolby TrueHD, which made our ears feel pampered by the effects again. The writer of these lines first saw this movie on the same display as a very high-quality MKV rip (16 GB), and even then the very outstanding quality of the "copy" was noticeable. The Blu-ray even added a shovel to this, although the difference cannot be mentioned on one page compared to the DVD version.
Lossless Dolby decoding is seamless
Let's take a detour here! Many people swear by the MKV/X.264 pair - not by chance. Currently, looking at the ratio of storage capacity/quality, there is no coding procedure with a better indicator that is widely used. However, does Blu-ray have a practical raison d'être over a high-quality rip (convenience and extra features aside)? We think so. Of course, the assessment of this is very subjective, who expects what from the "cinema", what senses they have, how receptive they are to the subject. Of course, in the case of a 32" LCD or CRT it doesn't matter - or not at all - but above a certain size (here we can consider 50" again as a watershed) the superiority of the BR disc is clear. One of the most visible disadvantages of MKV is the color transition problem, which causes problems even with the best rip. This cannot arise with BR, just as the need for multiple storage capacities is not accidental: the image produced in this way is more fluid and natural to the eye (assuming, of course, the same source device).
Closely related to this is the next thing we looked at for the BD370 in this round. We loaded a 720p MKV DVD into the player to see what the BD370 would do with it when it had to display it on a full HD plasma upscaled to 1080p. The result was not bad, of course, don't think of the quality provided by a well-adjusted HTPC - but we didn't expect this from our protagonist. While we're at it, we've also tested his idea with DVD-Video. For this purpose, we dusted off the extra edition of the Matrix - the very first, "unsynchronized" version - and viewed a few chapters. The result can be said to be good on average, we did not experience any glaring errors - in other words, we can safely use our test subject to play DVDs sometimes.
