Philips BDP3000 review

Philips’ BDP3000 is one of the most attractive players we’ve seen, with its clean, minimalist lines. The front panel contains four plain buttons and the disc tray, and its rounded edges are a relief from the harsh lines of most players. However, this minimalism extends to its specification, too; the BDP3000 is one of the few Blu-ray players not to support DTS-HD Master Audio.

We performed a software update as soon as we started testing the BDP3000. It continued to report that a new update was available over the network, even after we ran the update process several times. When we checked the website we found that the latest update was the same as the installed version.

This is one of the few players we’ve seen not to support Dynamic Range Compression to keep volume at a uniform level, balancing out loud and soft scenes in a film, which is useful if you don’t want to disturb people while you’re watching a movie at night.

There’s a USB port, but the BDP3000 can’t play music and video files from it. Instead, this port simply enables you to add storage for downloading BD Live Content. That’s the only type of content you can view from the internet, as there’s no YouTube support.

The lack of USB storage support is more of a shame as the BDP3000 supports so many video formats, including DivX files. It can also play Blu-ray content recorded on to DVD, as well as AVCHD files. Strangely, it won’t play videos with AAC audio tracks, which is the standard for MP4 movies created for use on mobile devices such as the PSP and iPod.

Where the BDP3000 really shone was in our speed tests. While it took a leisurely 17 seconds to open the tray from Off, it was the fastest to get to the main menu of a film; in fact, it was eight seconds faster than its nearest rival. Flicking through chapters within a film was also incredibly quick. We found navigating menus and the contents of a data disc was also pretty nippy. DVD playback was good, but the upscaling of discs created more ghosting than on other players.

We like the BDP3000’s neat design and quick operation, but the lack of DTS-HD Master Audio support and the annoying firmware warnings count against it.