Marantz BD8002 Blu-ray player reviewed by Theodore Vireday

July 4, 2008

Design:

The front of the unit is all glossy black with a thin strip of silver along the bottom. To the far left is the Power button surrounded by a blue light which unfortunately can't be turned off in the settings menu. All the graphics are in high-def and are easy enough to navigate.

Remote Control:

The included remote is average for a Blu-ray player. We liked the centrally located directional pad and the clearly labeled buttons. One of our gripes is the location of the standard playback controls. They are far from the directional pad. There is a flip-down panel on the bottom of the remote but it's not a nuisance since it only hides some nonessential buttons like a number pad.

Features:

The main feature of this player is its ability to play Blu-ray discs. It can also play standard-definition DVDs and upconvert them to higher resolutions . Unlike Sony's PlayStation 3 and Sony's older BDP-S1 the BDP-S300 doesn't support SACD. This player has support for standard Dolby Digital and DTS surround soundtracks and it also has support for the slightly higher quality Dolby Digital Plus format. What's more important is that this player lacks support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks. The connectivity is standard for the breed. There's an HDMI output which can handle both 1080p high-definition video along with high resolution audio. This player also has a couple of additional enthusiast-friendly features. One is the ability to output at 24 frames per second. We've tested a few players with this ability and haven't seen any increased performance with the displays we've used.

Performance:

We started off our test looking at Corpse Bride in 1080p on this player. This disc is extremely sharp and any difference in detail between the players should be visible. We found it very difficult to find any significant differences in the image quality between the players. This is even more so the case when watching at a standard viewing distance of around 8 feet for a 50-inch plasma. We took a look at some test patterns on Silicon Image's HQV test suite on Blu-ray in 1080p mode on both players. Like we said before there's really very little difference in Blu-ray performance among all Blu-ray players.

Rating: