LG BD300

There are a multitude of Blu-ray players on the home cinema market so what does LG’s BD300 offer to make it stand out in a crowd?

The answer is plenty. The BD300 boasts solid disc compatibility for starters; it read our home-made Verbatim BD-R with ease, in addition to reading every pressed (original) disc we threw at it. It also handled DVD-/+RW media and standard CD-RW media without skipping a beat.

The LG can also play content stored on a USB stick via a front mounted USB port and via Ethernet connection. With the network option, the player allows you to connect and view content from website ‘Netflix’. Unfortunately Netflix doesn’t currently operate in the Middle East region, which means you can’t take advantage of it just yet. The player offers an array of output ports so regardless of what TV and sound system you already own, you won’t have trouble getting the BD300 connected.

Using the player’s HDMI output to view the movie ‘300’ on our Viewsonic VX2835wm LCD screen, the LG performed well. The video was crisp and fluid though we did notice a few missed details on some of the close-up shots. Skipping from scene-to-scene, the player goes about its business with almost no lag. Viewing DVDs, the BD300 isn’t as adept, we noticed somewhat jumpy images and jaggedness on a number of the visuals.