CUSTOM INSTALLATION HOW-TO

There are two video modes you can choose on the LG: Default and User. With User selected, you can tweak brightness, contrast, sharpness, and color (the player puts out a still pic of grinning, happy children for you to make adjustments with), as well as change the individual levels of the primary and secondary colors. And there's also a handful of noise reduction options, including a White Noise Reduction mode that proved very effective in cleaning up grainy pictures. (The Block NR option also worked well, but Mosquito NR made pictures look seriously fuzzy.)

The LG's Audio setup menu proved straightforward. With the player hooked up to my preamp via an HDMI connection, I selected the PCM Multi-Ch option, which delivers both multichannel PCM soundtracks on discs and regular Dolby Digital/DTS soundtracks as 6-channel PCM over an HDMI link. Other options in the Audio Setup menu include DTS re-encode (which does what its name suggests, sending out DTS and Dolby Digital soundtracks as a DTS bitstream) and Primary Pass-Thru. The latter option is meant for setups where you want to send a Dolby Digital or DTS bitstream output to an external processor or receiver for decoding. LG's manual hints that this option should also work for sending out a lossless multichannel Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio bitstream via HDMI, but the same LG rep I queried before confirmed that this wasn't the case (yet another item to look out for in that forthcoming firmware upgrade).

Performance The BH200 proved to be a serious speed demon. Power-up time - from when I initially hit the Power button to when the disc tray responded to an Open command - took a mere 30 seconds, and I had to twiddle my thumbs for only 25 seconds more before the FBI warning showed up onscreen after loading a disc. The player also offers remarkably smooth fast-forward and reverse scanning of DVDs, although the same fast, fluid performance doesn't extend to HD DVD and Blu-ray. As with other high-def disc players I've tested, resuming playback after stopping the disc works only for Blu-ray and DVD titles. With HD DVDs, you need to start from the beginning when resuming play from a full stop -an apparent limitation of the format.

Ideally, you'd expect a dual-format player to provide equally good picture quality with both Blu-ray and HD DVD. This was very much the case with the BH200: All high-def discs that I flipped into the player's tray looked wonderfully sharp and clean on my 1080p-rez plasma TV. Both high-def discs and regular DVDs also looked very crisp when I used the player's component-video output to connect to the TV - something that I can't say for every high-def disc player I've handled.

For most of my testing, I left the player set to its Default video mode, which uses Qdeo video processing to deinterlace and scale the standard 480i-rez video on regular DVD up to 1080p resolution. I'd never heard of Qdeo before, but the LG's upconversion performance left a positive impression: It passed the full set of tests contained on the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark discs, and the DVD movies I watched on the player also looked uniformly clean and artifact-free. I'm glad to see LG taking DVD picture quality seriously. The BH200's attention to this detail makes it a truly universal player.

Bottom Line LG's BH200 Super Blu player is the third machine I've tested in the past year that's capable of spinning both Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs. And with backers of both formats sticking to their guns, it's a safe bet that we'll see a few more of these decks in the future. The BH200's key advantages include strong video performance with all manner of discs and reliable, glitch-free operation. Where the LG comes up short is in its output connections (which seem limited against those of Samsung's Duo HD player), its lack of a menu-selectable 1080p/24 video output, and its limited-to-nonexistent support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. But, as with other Blu-ray and HD DVD players, the promise of a firmware update is always around the corner, and I was told that LG is considering both the 1080p/24 output issue and full multichannel support for the advanced audio formats. If and when these upgrades come to pass, the BH200 will be the high-def disc player to beat.

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