It’s made by LG (LG BD630) which is a company I only know for their cell phones. Are they a decent manufacturer for something like a blu-ray player? Does anyone have any experience with this? I don’t even know what I should be looking for in a player. My primary criteria is price, as I can’t afford anything expensive.
That specific model, I don’t know, but we’ve got an LG blu-ray, as well as several LG monitors and other electronics.
The company, as a whole, is good, IME. And that’s a pretty basic player, so there’s not a lot of points it can go wrong. I wouldn’t worry too much about dropping a c-note on this being wasted, given that.
Blu-ray players have more or less reached the point where they’re all the same. The only difference between most players is whether they’re Internet-capable or not and this one is.
We have 4 LG TVs right now, and so far they seem to be holding up well. I almost took the chance and bought one similar to this - I think it was a bd640 or something - at Walmart yesterday when I was out shopping, but I checked Amazon and saw this one cheaper. I may end up buying it from there now because that was cheaper than Walmart’s “black Friday sale” price (which seemed to be the regular price, just heavily advertised).
I would imagine these hold up well. LG products are typically reliable and anything I’ve found about the BD630 seems to be positive. One of the big things is that for $67, it includes network and you can play Netflix and whatnot. I nearly purchased a blu-ray player for $50 that couldn’t do those things, so to me that seems like a good deal. I would rather spend $17 more and get more functionality out of it.
LG used to produce electronics under the Goldstar brand. These were extremely low end crappy items. To put a better spin on their poor brand image, they renamed their stuff LG.
They have worked fairly hard at improving quality control. I’d say they are just now around the “acceptable” side of the line. They are of course well ahead of the cheapo Chinese brands, but that’s not saying much.
I’d go with Sony/Panasonic type brands myself in this category.
I have an LG bluray player -a 370, so it’s not wireless, and doesn’t have netflix access (dammit); I like it, it plays everything I throw at it (I’ll stick torrent mkv’s onto a thumb drive and plug it into the front of the player), decent start up time, picture quality seems fine, I’m pleased. My old LG 1080 upscaler DVD player’s in the bedroom, and likewise plays everything I chuck at it- and has for about 5 years.
I don’t think you can even connect a blu-ray player to a standard CRT set. The set needs an HDMI input. You could maybe swing composite on a set under 10 years old, but there’s really no point unless what you’re watching can produce a 1080p picture. Save that dough for a new TV!
Agreed - I can’t imagine that you’ll see almost any difference if you’re not working with an HDTV. If you do, it’ll be very slight. You’re better off saving up for a new TV.
We do have a smaller HD tv in the bedroom. We could hook it up to that until we get a better living room TV. Right now there isn’t even a DVD player in the bedroom so this would greatly increase the usefulness of that TV…
In that case it might be a nice way of future-proofing any media purchases you make.
You still won’t see much of the benefit of BluRay on a small screen. (A lot of smaller hdtvs only do 720p, and even then you won’t see a huge difference in image quality over standard def, because you’re not going to be watching with your nose pressed up against the screen and the picture will look the same if you’re sitting in bed looking at the set 10 feet away.)
This model will hook up to your living room set, if you’ve just reached the point where you don’t want to be spending money on the DVD format anymore. It also has some nice network features that might be of interest to you, and will play .mkv, DivX and Xvid movies - which is a perk if you don’t have a dedicated media player already.
I wouldn’t say a word against LG’s current crop of AV kit - I have both a plasma TV and an upscaling DVD player from LG and am well satisfied with them.
One caveat would be - do you like 3D? It seems likely that 3D sets will be affordable for mere mortals when you get around to shopping for a new TV. When we got our HD set, 3D was still way beyond our price point - but now I am starting to wish we had held out a little longer, because it will be a goodly long time before I can justify upgrading the TV again, and damnit I want a 3D TV (for both movies and games.) if you think you might like to have a 3D TV in the future, you might regret having a player that isn’t 3D capable.
I will check to see if it has an HDMI input. It’s only about 5 years old. One reason I want us to have a Blu-ray player is that some titles we want aren’t available on DVD, only on Blu-ray. Also aren’t there different kinds of extras you can get on Blu-ray than you can on DVD? But if it proves impossible, like I said, for now it will go on the bedroom TV.
What exactly do you mean by “future-proofing”? I don’t understand the phrase.
