Daewoo DBP-1000 Blu-ray player reviewed by George Chadwick

May 30, 2008

Design:

The look of this player is a refreshing break from what we see on other Blu-ray players. The dark gray plastic casing has rounded corners rather than the traditional boxy edges. The faceplate is darker glossy black with the logo prominently featured in the center of the unit.

Remote Control:

Included remote control has a decent button layout. The remote has a centrally located directional pad surrounded by useful buttons such as Back and Pop-up Menu. We liked the separate rocker buttons for volume and channel control--for those who want to control their TV with this remote--but the placement of the playback controls is subpar. The back side of the remote is covered with a glossy finish attracting finger prints.

Features:

This player is one of the first player to be Blu-ray profile 1.1 compliant. This means it meets several hardware requirements including 64kb of onboard persistent memory 256MB of local storage and both secondary audio and video decoders.This should allow the player to play picture-in-picture commentary and perhaps take advantage of other interactive features available on Blu-ray Profile 1.1 discs--none of which are on the market yet. This player is one of the first Blu-ray players that can output both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks in bitstream format. The connectivity package on the player is very good. The main video output is naturally HDMI which is capable of outputting both 1080p video signals as well as HD audio.

Performance:

This player evinced middling performance. It didn't pass the Film Resolution Loss Test. as the edges of one of the boxes exhibited strobe-like behavior--we've seen other players perform worse. We could see some minor moire in the grandstands of Raymond James Stadium but otherwise it did an acceptable job. It had no problem passing the Video Resolution Loss Test demonstrating its competence on video-based material. On M:I:III it did well by showing no moire on the stairs at the beginning of Chapter 8. We also looked at some movies in 24 frames per second output. The output at 24 frames was not as flawless as it should have been. We saw quite a few instances of stuttering that wasn't present when we had set at standard 1080p/60 mode.

Rating: