The inexorable downward trajectory of the price of a decent Blu-ray player continues apace.
After some strenuous testing our new favourite player is the £170 Sony BDP-S370, but already it's got brand-new competition in the shape of this LG BD570.
And it's quite a nice shape, too. The flappy front panel has to stay open if you want to use USB memory to access BD-Live facilities, as the BD570 does without any internal flash memory, but otherwise it's a good-looking machine with plenty going on, specification-wise.
Wireless connectivity
Wireless DNLA compliancy, for use with any PC or DNLA server attached to your home network is a particular highlight. On-screen menus are logical and concise, and these are words that apply equally to the remote control.
Blu-ray discs load decently quickly (even the interminable Terminator 2) and look alluring. The LG draws from a wide-ranging colour palette to deliver natural, high-contrast images – it has a notable facility with textures of all types, and handles motion well.
Detail levels are high, black levels agreeable and picture noise repressed well in all but the most trying circumstances (that slow pan in the first scene of The Dark Knight, for example).
The downside of upscaling
The BD570's success is slightly more qualified when upscaling DVDs. Colours, contrasts and detail levels remain impressive, but there's picture noise in evidence more often than not.
Sound from any source is, by prevailing standards, on the diffident side. It's nicely balanced at all times, certainly, and is commendably detailed, but there's no denying the lack of dynamic oomph.
In a sector as competitive as this, that's not quite good enough.
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