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.
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