Alastair G. Stell
Important you check prices as this is a basic unit - no streaming, no wifi - and does not command a premium price. Does not deserve a three digit price. The good: What it does do, it does well. Which is play a good variety of disks including blu-ray, dvd and a wide assortment of R/W formats. Picture quality is excellent. Load time of blu-ray and DVD is likewise excellent. Played some rather suspect disks (scratches and abrasions) without issue. Simple to connect and use. Any HDMI cable works fine for 1080p TVs but you might need a cable tested for HDMI 2.0 if youre connecting to a 4K TV. The only other output in an optical cable which worked out-of-the-box on my old 5.1 system. No display. Displays are generally distracting and worthless since on-screen menus are the norm today. Happily this unit does not have one. The bad: Very few frills and no streaming. Im not too concerned about streaming - I have Amazon Fire TV for that purpose - but needing a wired connection purely to get bluray updates is super annoying. Probably explains why the unit is heavily discounted. I suspect the USB port is only USB 2.0. I tried some more advanced USB 3.0 memory sticks but the unit did not recognize them. The remote control is minimalistic. Again, no frills and very small. No back-light for the keys etc.. A basic and lackluster remote but adequate. No cables supplied. Again, about what youd expect on a basic, budget unit. Unimpressive. This is NOT a multi-region player. As I have lived all over the world this is a considerable nuisance although I have now bought a "hacked" player so I can watch my extensive DVD collection. In summary, this is a very decent multi-format player which is why I bought it. As a solution for a household which primarily streams content, I have no real gripes other than the need to connect the player to ethernet purely to receive bluray security updates.