One player to rule your living room.
The original setup process of the LG BD670 was a 2 minute job, but after I was done with connecting it to my Wi-Fi, I had to decide whether to update the firmware or not. I decided to go ahead anyways, and the whole process to around 14 minutes. There was another firmware after that, but it only lasted 4 minutes. Now that I was all updated and ready to go, I inserted The Dark Knight blu-ray and enjoyed the frame perfect playback with not a hint of even the slightest distortion or color bleed or over-sharpness. Everything was incredibly crisp and clean. Like how I expect blu-ray playback to be in the first place.
I have to mention at this point that I tested out the BD670 alongside the LG 42LW5700 Cinema 3D TV, which I had calibrated already.
Now I popped in one of my very few DVDs into the BD670, Band of Brothers. The upscaling was immediately obvious as I saw a sharper overall image where I could clearly see the characters, instead of the slight blurriness that usually happens when watching DVDs on an HDTV. Unfortunately Band of Brothers also has a lot of grainy images to add a “dated” effect to the series, which meant that instead of adding atmosphere to the overall experience, the grainy video was quite a turnoff. I decided to go with a completely different movie instead, and inserted the Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children DVD. The beauty of the upscaling was immediately obvious and a marked improvement over Band of Brothers. I then decided to playback the Blu-ray version of Advent Children (yes, I’m a fan!) and apart from a more sharper image with ever so slightly improved (more vivid) colors, there wasn’t a huge difference between the Blu-ray version and the upscaled DVD. Extremely impressive playback in both scenarios from the BD670 indeed.
Then I plugged in my external HDD via the front USB which contains a lot of HD movies, anime and TV series. The most immediate effect was that navigating through all of the files and folders was quite a slow, and gradually irritating, experience. Browsing through the files was nowhere near as fast as my WD TV Live media box. Apart from that niggle, playback for pretty much everything was a simple and smooth. I don’t think the BD670 upscales any videos from an external HDD because some of the video content was DVD quality or had a lower bitrate in HD resolutions looked bad as well. Maybe bad is a strong word here, it just didn’t look as good as high bitrate HD content or upscaled DVDs and Blu-rays.
I’ll conclude by saying that the LG BD670 is a brilliant blu-ray player that will take care of all your entertainment viewing needs. It plays back Blu-rays perfectly, upscales DVDs smoothly and has a lot of streaming options which playback smoothly (depending on your router). Firmware upgrades not only improve the performance, but also add more channels/ apps as well.
