Sigmatek BR-1000 Blu-ray player reviewed by Tom Vitter

June 28, 2008

Design:

Like many of its precedessor designs this player looks shiny and high tech. The front panel features a glossy black finish that's prone to fingerprints. There are only On/Off button coupled with directional pad for forward and reverse operation. There are plenty of LED lights to indicate operations.

Remote Control:

We absolutely hated the remote on the previous model. Luckily a more reasonable clicker was included on this model. Toward the bottom half of the remote is the circular directional pads surround by three large buttons and four smaller buttons in the corners. Our biggest complaint with the remote is that the setup menu button was buried at the bottom.

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: