Philips BDP9000 Blu-ray player reviewed by Travis Fader

July 5, 2008

Design:

This player received the highest design score of any next-generation player we've reviewed so far. Its silver chassis and a black front panel combine for an unusually stylish look. The front panel is glossy and is marked by only two buttons: power and disc open/close. our only complaint about the design is that the aforementioned blue light around the disc drive and the blue light next to the power button cannot be dimmed.

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 can play standard-definition DVDs and CDs. It cannot play any discs of the competing HD DVD format. The BD-P1400's high-resolution soundtrack support is excellent. It has onboard decoding for Dolby Digital Plus Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD High Resolution. This means it can output these soundtracks either in PCM format over the HDMI output or via the analog outputs. the player also offers bitstream output for high-resolution soundtracks. There should be absolutely no sound quality difference whether you let the receiver decode or the player decode. Connectivity is also solid. There's an HDMI output capable of carrying both 1080p video signals and high- resolution audio. One drawback for this player is that it is Blu-ray profile 1.0 which means it does not meet the hardware requirements that will be necessary to access some special features on Blu-ray discs released in the future.

Performance:

This player performed excellently by properly deinterlacing 1080i signals to 1080p without artifacts or jaggies. It passed the video resolution test easily and also had no problem with the film resolution test. It did stumble on the two video-based HQV tests--showing some jaggies on a rotating white line and three pivoting lines--but we tend to give these tests less weight as there is very little Blu-ray content shot on video (as opposed to film) currently available. we started with Mission Impossible: III. We immediately took a look at the stairs at beginning of Chapter 8 and the it had no problem outputting a clean image. After spot-checking some known problematic scenes we sat down with the excellent-looking Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Details are razor sharp and the jaggies of the DVD era were nowhere to be seen. The jaggies seen on the video-based HQV tests were nowhere to be found in all the program material we watched.

Rating: