Reviews

If you're looking for pleasing image quality in a Blu-ray player, and you want to spend less than $200, the Insignia NS-WBRDVD ($180, as of December 14, 2009) makes a terrific choice. It can connect to the Internet wirelessly, and it lets you stream movies off Netflix On Demand if you don't want to wait for a disc. It has a few weaknesses, but they're reasonable trade-offs for the price.

Blu-ray Disc images from the NS-WBRDVD generally looked better than those from our reference player, a Sony PlayStation 3. The Insignia provided significantly better detail than the PS3, with pleasing color balance and a good sense of depth. It worked well with several different film styles, from the bright, natural sunlight of Mission: Impossible III (chapter 7) to the animated Cars (chapter 1) to the black-and-white Good Night and Good Luck (chapter 1), which looked especially impressive, with good contrast and a firm sense of film grain.

At first glance, the slim Toshiba BDX2000--the company's first Blu-ray Disc player--seems unexceptional, with limited extras and a boxy remote. But when you pop a Blu-ray disc into it and see what the BDX2000 can do, you'll realize what a bargain it is ($200, as of December 14, 2009).

The BDX2000's image quality was fantastic in five of the six Blu-ray titles we tried on it. In chapter 1 of Cars, the color red popped out without looking garish. In a low-contrast, day-for-night scene from The Searchers (chapter 20), John Wayne's suspenders stood out from his shirt with an almost three-dimensional look. And the opening of Good Night and Good Luck demonstrated that the BDX2000 can handle black-and-white beautifully.

The $250 (as of December 14, 2009) Pioneer BDP-320 sends gorgeous pictures to an HDTV, but it lacks the Web streaming multimedia capabilities of even lower priced Blu-ray Disc players such as the LG BD370 and the Panasonic DMP-BD60K.

Pop a Blu-ray disc into the BDP-320 and you'll get muted yet beautiful and natural-looking colors--less saturated than those produced by our reference player, a Sony PlayStation 3, but more pleasing to the eye. Skin tones were realistically balanced throughout, and the opening scene of the black-and-white Good Night and Good Luck movie looked gorgeous.

The Sony BDP-S560 not only delivers terrific high-definition images, but also excels at upconverting DVDs, too. And it does so in a Wi-Fi enabled model. But this model ($300, as of December 14, 2009) lacks the streaming media extras that competing Blu-ray Disc players offer.

The BDP-S560 was most impressive in our black-and-white Good Night and Good Luck test. Even water glasses sitting on a banquet table popped with clarity and brilliance. It did almost as well in color movies, with a nice feel of dimensionality in the Mission: Impossible III test. Only in the animated Cars did it disappoint, where a sense of flatness earned it a rating of only Good.

The LG BD370 ($200, as of December 14, 2009) can stream Internet video from CinemaNow, Netflix On Demand, and YouTube to your HDTV. Even by the high standards of Blu-ray Disc players, the BD370 transfers Blu-ray disc images with terrific clarity.

The BD370's performance was dead-even with that of its sibling, the LG BD390, on all but one component of our tests (brightness, where the BD370 was ever so slightly better).

The Samsung BD-P3600 has a relatively high estimated street price for a Blu-ray Disc player ($290, as of December 14, 2009), but it delivers exquisite images from Blu-ray discs to your HDTV. With an Internet connection, it can stream videos from Blockbuster, Netflix, and Youtube, and music from Pandora. But it falls down on the little things, making the viewing experience more difficult than it should be.

In our image-quality tests, the BD-P3600 received scores of Very Good for its Blu-ray-based content, almost straight across the board. In test after test, it showed better color and contrast than our reference player, the Sony PlayStation 3. Night scenes looked realistically dark without losing detail, colors were believable, and black-and-white images had excellent fidelity. In a tire in a shot from chapter 1 of Cars, I saw texture I had never seen before.

When you pop a Blu-ray disc into the LG BD390 ($300, price as of December 14, 2009), prepare to be impressed. The images it delivered to an HDTV were among the best we've ever seen. And with support for BD-Live, CinemaNow, DLNA, Netflix On Demand, Wi-Fi, and YouTube, the BD390 provides top-flight networking capabilities.

Every Blu-ray disc we tried looked better on the BD390 than on our reference player, the Sony PlayStation 3--with superb colors and dimensionality. The difference in our black-and-white Good Night and Good Luck test was astounding, with sharp, clear whites that made the PS3 presentation look yellowish by comparison. When we examined a scene from Cars, the PS3 image looked flat next to the BD390 image's seeming depth.

The $200 Samsung BD-P1600 delivers good-looking Blu-ray playback and adds a host of multimedia goodies--including BD-Live, Netflix On Demand, and Pandora streaming to your TV and home-theater sound system--previously found only in higher-end Samsung models. Unfortunately, this Blu-ray Disc player stumbles in a few simple areas.

When playing Blu-ray discs, the BD-P1600 sent very good but not spectacular images to our HDTV. Its best performance came in its handling of the opening sequence of the animated movie Cars, where it delivered vibrant, saturated colors.

The Lenovo IdeaCentre Q100 is a nettop PC, a supersmall, supercheap box that essentially uses netbook components. It's a touch bigger than the typical external hard drive, and at $400 (as of December 13, 2009), it costs just about as much, too. In fact, the Q100 is so small that it comes with a plastic stand to help it maintain a pretty, upright posture on a desk, nightstand, or bookshelf. But as you might expect, achieving such a minute size has forced Lenovo to make quite a few sacrifices on this system--so much so, that you may just be better off buying a netbook.

The Q100's 1.6GHz Atom N230 processor is a netbook favorite, and geared more for practical power consumption than punishing speeds. It helps the Q100 stay small and cool, but not much else. Competitors such as the $330 Acer AspireRevo R3610 nettop at least offer a dual-core Atom processor (plus nVidia Ion graphics), and the slightly bigger Dell Zino HD adds an optical drive. For $100 more, you could get the Ion-powered version of the Q100, the IdeaCentre Q110. It also includes a TV tuner and remote, as well as 2GB of RAM, but the processor is the same, and you still don't get HDMI output as you do on the cheaper Acer or Dell alternatives.

Take a low-power, silent desktop, and stuff it with netbook components. In the case of the $320 (as of December 13, 2009) Acer AspireRevo R3610, make sure to bless it with HDMI output and 1080p video playback, too. What do you get? A nettop. These Lilliputian systems provide a fraction of a traditional desktop’s power at a fraction of the size and cost. While they’re generally serviceable for basic browsing and e-mail tasks, the R3610's nVidia Ion graphics also give it media-center potential--as does its compact 7.1-by-7.1-by-1.2-inch size.

We've sung the praises of nVidia's Ion platform before, and the GPU-maker's integrated graphics product turns the AspireRevo into a real contender. Gaming still isn’t an option--the system produced just 12 frames per second in our Unreal Tournament 3 tests (at 1024 by 768, and highest settings). But when it comes to HD video output, Ion trumps typical integrated graphics from Intel right now. The AspireRevo sports VGA and HDMI ports, and streams music, photos, and 1080p video with aplomb. Compare that with the similarly equipped Sony VAIO P netbook, which struggles to handle even 320-by-240-resolution video on its Intel GMA 550 graphics processor.

Streaming HD Web video from sites such as Hulu or Vimeo was shaky on the AspireRevo until we installed the new Flash Player 10.1 Beta, which beefs up Flash playback by enlisting the help of the Ion graphics chip. The AspireRevo's support for 7.1 surround sound (via S/PDIF coaxial output), 802.11n Wi-Fi, and gigabit ethernet round out its home-theater PC capabilities. The system's Windows 7 Home Premium OS includes Media Center, but you'll need to get your own USB TV tuner or capture stick for DVR-like functionality.

On our WorldBench 6 test suite, the AspireRevo scored a paltry 36--the same as rival nettops such as the Lenovo IdeaCentre Q100, MSI Wind Nettop CS120, and Asus Eee Box B202. The bottom line: Power users or gamers should look farther up the desktop PCs food chain.