Review: Philips BDP9000 Blu-ray Disc Player
Review: Philips BDP9000 Blu-ray Disc Player
August 2007 By Greg RobinsonFor some time now, Philips has been producing gear that adheres to their corporate tag line: “Sense and Simplicity.” The BDP9000 is no exception, sporting clean-looking silver casework, a plain black face plate and a snazzy blue light which illuminates the disc tray. The front panel contains a mere two buttons (Power and Eject), while the remainder of the control buttons and a multi-format memory card reader are hidden behind a flip-down door. One important button behind said door is labeled “Video Output Selection.” This allows you to toggle between HDMI or component video output.
One of the chief complaints heard from HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc early adopters has been system boot times. The BDP9000 performs better than average in this department. With the unit off, pressing the “Open” button requires 18 seconds before the tray extends. After hitting “Close,” I counted 23 seconds before a picture appeared on-screen. Finally, with the player on and in a stopped state, the BDP9000 requires only 3 seconds to turn completely off. All things considered, the Philips is slower than the PS3 but much faster than my first generation HD DVD player.
Connection options on the back panel are about what you’d expect from a high definition disc player. In addition to HDMI and component video, you’ll also find both optical and coaxial digital audio outputs and a 5.1 channel analog audio output fed by the player’s internal decoder. This is where things start to get a little dicey.
The audio capabilities of the BDP9000 represent the player’s only substantial weakness. First, let’s talk DVD. If you want to enjoy a Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1 track on a standard DVD, you must use the optical or coaxial connection to your receiver. Reason being, the BDP9000 does not feature on-board 5.1 decoding from a standard DVD—such decoding is only available for Blu-ray discs.
As for Blu-ray Disc audio, you may be aware that there are several new high resolution audio formats which made their debut alongside HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. They are: Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD (lossless), DTS-HD, DTS-HD Master Audio (lossless) and uncompressed PCM (lossless). Although the BDP9000 supports these formats, the lossless formats are only supported by way of a bitstream output via HDMI. That means the only way you can experience a Dolby TrueHD soundtrack at full resolution is to connect the BDP9000 to a receiver that features an HDMI input and built-in Dolby TrueHD decoding (Onkyo’s TX-SR605 for example, the first of its kind). Confused yet? Good. Let’s move on.
Connected to an Epson 1080p projector (reviewed in this issue), the BDP9000 automatically switched to 1080p output after completing the “digital handshake.” Video performance on the BDP9000 is roughly equivalent to what I’ve seen from Samsung’s first generation player and Sony’s PS3. That is to say, high def discs look fantastic. One of my favorite BD titles is Sony’s Casino Royale and the BDP9000 did a wonderful job rendering the intricate details. Standard DVDs got upconverted to 1080p, and for the most part the BDP9000 does a fine job with them. I prefer the upconverted picture from my Oppo DV-981HD, but the BDP9000 is a solid DVD player.
The BDP9000 is a mixed bag but I found myself liking it quite a bit. Video performance is excellent, load times are relatively quick, on-screen menus are some of the best I’ve seen and the remote is rather good. If you can look past its audio decoding shortcomings, the BDP9000 is a respectable soldier in the high definition format war. yy
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