Philips BDP7500 MK II

Philips has decided to make the most of the big arrival of 3D TVs to update its BDP7500 Blu-ray player to this new version. It has the same features as its predecessor and is still at a very attractive price.

It's worth nothing that there are two different versions available: the BDP7500S2 (silver) and the BDP7500B2 (black).

Hardware

On the outside, this model is just like the first version of the BDP7500, so we suggest you take a look at that review if you'd like more details.

The only real change has been the addition of support for DLNA networks, which means the media player itself has also been upgraded. You can now use the USB port for external storage devices formatted using NTFS as well as FAT32. Unfortunately, though, it can't handle many formats, and we only managed JPEG photos, MP3 audio files and DivX5 and 6 video in SD and HD. 1080p DivX 6 looks great up to a bitrate of 38 Mbps, but from 42 Mbps and up, things start to get shaky. If you like watching movies with subtitles, you should know the media player doesn't show these.



This is a very responsive player, and it only took five seconds to get going from standby and then another 19 seconds to show the very first frame of our Blu-ray test disc. Older players would take anywhere from 50 seconds to well over a minute to do the same.

Image Quality

By default, the BDP7500 is in Standard mode, and that's a sensible choice, as the results with a Blu-ray disc are perfectly neutral in both 2D and 3D.


When we checked it out in the lab with our test TV, there were absolutely no colour discrepancies or incorrect reproductions to report. The graphs speak for themselves, and, apart from a few details, are identical to those produced by the PlayStation 3.

With a DVD, the Philips BDP7500's upscaling isn't quite accurate enough, and next to the PS3, it doesn't look all that great. Sony's upscaling algorithm leaves some of the contours in place, which makes for a smoother result. However, the results are much better than what you would find from upscaling done by a TV.

Audio Formats

No surprises here: the BDP7500 could handle every audio format we tried. Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD HR and DTS HD MA are all available as a bitstream or PCM via the HDMI port. If you amp doesn't have an HDMI input, then you can also pick them up via the analogue 7.1 outputs.

Energy Consumption

Finally, this Blu-ray 3D player doesn't need much power. Our equipment reported energy consumption of 0.1 W on standby and 22 W while playing a Blu-ray disc or DVD.