By next Christmas there will be at least two competing Blu-ray/HD DVD combo set top players. The only one currently on the market is the BH100 by LG. It’s a slim and speedy set top box but has a few rather wide shortcomings. By Christmas season Samsung will throw its hat into the combo player mix with the announced BD-UP5000. With two separate players from which to choose by ’08 the format war could be over after only its first year.
LG BH100: This is the first combo player that might have been rushed out of the gate by LG electronics of Korea. It has a few well documented shortcomings but overall it looks like a very good device for a high price.
LG’s specs cite that it’s capable of 1080P at 24 frames per second through its HDMI port. It’s HDMI is not the new ‘deep color’ aka HDMI 1.3 so if you’re looking for bleeding edge video technology you’ll have to wait. The player doesn’t support HDi which is HD DVD’s interactive feature. This might not be a big deal to consumers who aren’t crazy about DVD special features and it’s possible it could be updated in firmware. It does support Blu-ray’s equivalent java based interactive feature set known as BD-J.
On the audio side things look a little less rosy. The specs say it supports Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby True HD and DTS-HD. It does but only through analogue outputs. This is going to be a bone of contention to those who bought a receiver with a full compliment of HDMI in/outs. Over HDMI it only decodes the lossless high def audio formats over two channels. One of the key features of the new high def formats was fully digital 5.1 channel lossless audio over HDMI.
Still, it’s an amazing DVD player considering the current format war. But the price is no savings $1299.95 you’ll want to save those dollars and cents before buying.
Samsung BD-UP5000: Samsung’s press release promises a competing system just in time for Christmas. Hopefully they can get a few of the bugs ironed out that it’s fellow Korean cross town rival could not. We may be hoping the Samsung unit will sell for about half the price but I wouldn’t hold my breath.