Philips BDP9000 – PC World
Last updated
March 27, 2007
Reviewed by
Lincoln Spector
Philips BDP9000
This Blu-ray Disc player offers good design and image quality, but don’t expect much from the documentation.
As in a Hollywood movie that adheres too closely to a formula, nothing really stands out about Philips’s BDP9000 ($800 as of 2/20/07). It’s a basic black box–reasonably, but not exceptionally, well-designed in both looks and function. The images it sends to your TV look good, but not fantastic. It does have some nice features, though, such as memory card slots for viewing pictures and listening to audio.
Based on its appearance, design, and performance, this model appears to be the twin of Samsung’s BD-P1000, our top-ranked player in our “High-Def Video Superguide” roundup (neither company would confirm this). The two players have similar response times, and output images of about the same quality, and their sound quality is indistinguishable. They offer the same on-screen menu options–albeit with different menus, fonts, and colors. Though they look like different machines from the front, their back panels are identical.
The BDP9000’s on-screen menus and messages have a pleasing look, with nicely legible lettering and an easy-to-navigate splash screen. Unfortunately, neither the on-screen information display nor the front panel of the player itself shows you the movie’s chapter number.
The front panel looks stylish, though the thin, metallic power and eject buttons are annoying to press and don’t give much tactile feedback. The other controls are hidden beneath a front panel, which also conceals the two memory card slots (for CompactFlash, Memory Stick, and Secure Digital cards) that let you listen to music and view photographs.
Like Samsung’s BD-P1000, the Philips BDP9000 produced great images, trailing just a shade behind the top video-test performers, the Sony BDP-S1 and the Pioneer Elite BDP-HD1. In Mission: Impossible III, hallways felt three-dimensional; and in the black-and-white Good Night and Good Luck, shadow detail was rich.
The remote control is long and hefty. It felt comfortable and sturdy in my hand, and I found its many buttons well-arranged and convenient to use.
The Philips BDP9000’s built-in audio decoding support is poor. It outputs only Linear PCM and Dolby Digital 5.1, and it doesn’t support the newer lossless codecs, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio (those are reduced to their core Dolby Digital or DTS audio streams). In our tests, the unit’s audio sounded muddy compared with that of our best performer, the Sony BDP-S1. You might get better results by outputting audio via bitstream to your audio/video receiver instead.
The Philips BDP9000 lets you create up to ten bookmarks by pressing a button; retrieving the bookmarks is similarly simple. Once you eject the disc, however, the bookmarks are expunged; HD DVD players, by contrast, can retain bookmarks, since the format requires the players to have built-in storage.
The Philips falters when it comes to support documentation. At first glance it looks like any other TV accessory instruction book, but it’s not much help if you need detailed information. When you’re setting up your audio options, for instance, the Philips (like most of these players) asks if you want the audio output to your amplifier as PCM or bitstream. What does that mean? According to the manual, the first option means that “the format of the digital audio signal is PCM,” and the second option means “the format of the digital audio signal is bitstream.” What the manual doesn’t explain is that bitstream output requires an external device such as a compatible audio receiver to decode the output; with PCM output, the audio is decoded in the player and sent to your receiver for amplification, relieving the latter device of decoding responsibilities.
Another issue is that self-administered firmware updates can be tricky. We had to use Nero’s Nero Ultra Edition disc-burning software–as recommended by the firmware’s readme text file–to get the player to recognize the firmware disc. We were unable to use other burning software to accomplish this task; if you don’t already have Nero’s software, you may have buy it to perform a firmware update.
In spite of its quirks, the Philips model is a good all-around player, though you’ll want to rely on your audio receiver and not the player to handle audio decoding.
Full Specifications
Price when rated – Pricing: Inexpensive $800 (as of 2/20/2007)
Overall design – Good
On-screen menus – Good
Ease of Use – Good
Responsiveness – Good
Remote control – Good
Other features – Good
Documentation – Fair
Performance
Color quality – Very Good: 83
Detail – Very Good: 84
Brightness and contrast – Very Good: 84
DVD-Video image quality – Very Good: 82
Overall performance – Very Good: 83
Specifications – Good
Maximum component-video-output resolution – 1080i
24p output support – No
HDMI output – Yes
HDMI version – 1.2
Maximum HDMI-output resolution – 1080p
Ethernet connection (for Internet connectivity) – No
Ethernet connection (for streaming content across home network) – No
DLNA compliance – No
USB 2.0 ports – No
USB port function – Not applicable
Component-video Output – Yes
S-Video output – Yes
Composite -video output – Yes
Two-channel analog audio output – Yes
Coaxial digital output – Yes
Optical digital output – No
Maximum audio output over HDMI – 5.1-channel PCM
Best audio output over S/PDIF – 5.1-channel Dolby Digital Plus
Bitstream output to audio/video receiver – Yes
Other audio features
DVD-Video upconversion – 1080i
Plays audio CDs – Yes
Supported DVD disc formats – DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW
Plays MP3 DVDs – Yes
Plays MP3 CDs – Yes
Support for two simultaneous video streams (for on-demand picture-in-picture) – No
Supported multimedia formats – JPEG, MP3
Storage – Not applicable
Firmware updates delivered via? – Disc mailing/Web download
Disc bookmarks – Yes
Media slots – CompactFlash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital
Other features – Integrated HD JPEG slide-show viewer
Warranty – One year parts/90 days labor
Weekday support hours – 16
Saturday support hours – 16
Sunday support hours – 15
Toll-free support number – Yes
Pros
Terrific menu design
Offers media-card playback
Cons
Lackluster sound
On-unit buttons are small
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