Pioneer BDP-LX70 Blu-ray player

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By Ty Pendlebury, CNET.com.au
Jul 11, 2007

It's taken a little while, but Blu-ray software has started to filter into selected Asian stores. With it, comes the newest Blu-ray player on the block, Pioneer's BDP-LX70. Currently there are players to cover every price point, and the BDP-LX70 is priced towards the premium end.

Upside: Though it's one of the more expensive players--and looks the part in its piano black finish--the Pioneer is also one of the most feature-rich unit announced so far. Not only is it backward compatible with conventional CD and DVD titles--some Blu-ray players aren't--it also offers value-added media streaming capabilities.

The BDP-LX70 comes with a network port, and in conjunction with its HD Home Networking feature, you can stream content from a Windows XP PC via Windows Media Connect. At this early stage, it appears that only WMV and WMA will be supported, but the company's official press release lists the ability for users to view their "favorite photos, music and movies". Hopefully, standards such as DivX and MP3 will also be supported in the future.

Pioneer is also pushing the BDP-LX70's support for 24Hz 1080p playback on compatible Blu-ray disks, and this is a feature which will work with its own plasma TV lineup. Most movies are shot on film, which runs at a speed of 24fps. However, most TVs and players need to convert this through a process known as 3:2 pulldown, to 50Hz/60Hz. This process introduces extra frames which may introduce judder--particularly noticeable on smooth panning shots. Pioneer claims that replaying the disks at the speed it was shot eliminates this problem.

Downside: The price. For S$2,445 (US$1,754.95), you can buy at least two PlayStation 3 consoles--and at some of the discounted stores you can even have the better part of three. Correspondingly, are people willing to re-purchase movies on Blu-ray discs which they already have on DVDs? Or will they simply invest in an upscaling DVD player? Side-by-side, Blu-ray movies look better than upscaled DVDs, but will this be enough to convince most people?

Outlook: We think Sony has sabotaged the rest of the Blu-ray market with the introduction of the PS3. Companies such as Pioneer have a hard time ahead trying to convince users of the benefits of its player over a--frankly excellent--game console at half the price. For the sake of Blu-ray as a format, we hope they can.