The Harman/Kardon BDP 10 is a Blu-ray player that hit the market in June 2009. The manufacturer lists the device for around 600 GBP, but internet pricing currently starts at around 350 GBP.

Florian Friedrich, tested on December 8, 2009

Excellent 24p movie picture.
Automatic film-mode detection for DVDs.
Bitstream HD-audio output.
Picture-in-picture and BD-Live.

Weaknesses in de-interlacing.
Faulty photo-playback.
Relatively expensive.

The excellent BDP 10 Blu-ray player displays gorgeous movie pictures and offers BD-Live support. Still, it’ll have a hard job establishing itself among the ever-growing competition, since many cheaper players perform just as well and offer better features. Let’s put it this way: This player is one for the individualists — specifically those that don’t mind digging a little deeper into their pockets.

Multimedia

Developed in the USA and manufactured in China, this player has one HDMI 1.3 output and can also play back MP3 music, DivX videos, and photos from a USB stick or recordable disc. During testing, we noticed that the TV didn’t recognize memory cards connected via a USB card reader (multiformat) — it also failed to recognize HD videos in AVCHD format. The problems continue if you try to play back high-definition JPEG photos; these show limited horizontal resolution. Still, the BD-Live support allows the player to download bonus material from the Internet, although it requires a separate USB stick (with at least a one-gigabyte capacity) in order to store new data (not supplied).

Design and Other Features

The connections panel sticks to the essentials. One special feature: the infrared input and output permit remote control of additional devices via a separate sensor.

The BDP 10’s design matches that of the manufacturers other devices perfectly. Indeed, this might be the biggest selling point for some customers, since the Harman/Kardon offers no more picture-quality or features than many far-cheaper players. OK, so it’s got gold-plated HDMI and USB sockets, but these bring little extra value in practice. Unfortunately, the American player is stingy with its picture controls — this is the sort of thing we’re used to seeing with Pioneer devices.

Operation

An unusual look and backlit buttons: the remote control.

The remote control earns plus points, particularly in the dark home-theater, thanks to its illuminated buttons. Other top features include a dimmable display and sockets for infrared receivers: Thanks to the latter, the Harman/Kardon can even be hidden inside a cupboard, since it receives IR commands via a separate sensor. In addition, the output socket relays all other received IR commands electrically, allowing remote control of an additional device. This practical function means you can control several components via a single IR sensor.

The BDP 10’s loading mechanism is anything but quiet — and it’s slow, too: Years seem to pass before discs finally begin to play. On the positive side, we love the 128x-speed fast-forward, the A/B repeat function, and the remote control’s status and audio buttons — these indicate the current chapter, playing time, language, and audio format.

The on-screen menu also impresses, providing quick and easy navigation. But then along comes the cooling fan to spoil all the fun. The fan springs into action rarely, but when it does it’s pretty loud — louder, in fact, than on almost any other player.

Picture Quality

Blu-ray:
In the main discipline — playing back Blu-rays — we noticed that the player clips grayscale test-patterns in the HDMI color-space settings RGB and YUV. It therefore fails to display grayscales in the blacker-than-black and whiter-than-white regions. But the x.v.Color mode is activated in the factory setup, whereby playback in the digital color space works correctly via YUV. Correct adjustment using a “Pluge” test-pattern is then easily achieved. Still, we would have liked the player to output the full range of grayscales in the RGB mode too.

To get the player to output in the original movie-theater frame rate of 24p, you have to activate “Film Mode” and set the resolution to “HDMI Auto” in the Display Setup menu. Then, the player delivers low-judder, flicker-free progressive pictures, as became clear on the Blu-rays “Quantum of Solace” and “Twilight”. With the BDP 10 set to “HDMI Auto”, it switches to 1080i output for 50- or 60-hertz HDTV material, leaving the connected display to convert the signal to 1080p. The reason for this: the BDP 10 lacks motion-adaptive de-interlacing — it therefore shows jagged, slightly flickering diagonal edges on moving objects. A player in this price class should actually be able to handle perfect 1080p de-interlacing itself, in our opinion — especially since the majority of competing models do. But the HDMI Auto setting does at least mean you automatically see the display device’s better de-interlacing for HDTV material.

DVD:
The American player also automatically outputs DVDs in 1080i format — again, there’s a good reason for this: In 1080/50p format, static images aren’t one-hundred-percent error-free — we observed slight flicker, for example, on vertical structures. Up-scaling to 1080p works, but you get the best results if you leave the job to the connected display. Then, the Harman/Kardon displays a stable DVD picture with no flicker — whether or not the disc has a progressive flag. Still, some other players manage slightly better scaling. In our beloved test DVD “Six Days Seven Nights”, for example, the almost-vertical propeller blades of an airplane have slightly jagged edges — here, other players manage a completely smooth reproduction. And lastly, as we mentioned earlier, there’s also a lack of controls for fine-tuning the picture, which is almost unforgiveable in this price class.

Sound Quality

The BDP 10 can output bitstream audio to modern AV receivers. It decodes Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD internally with no loss of quality and transmits them in 7.1-channel PCM format — this is great news especially for owners of older HDMI-equipped receivers. But with DTS Master Audio and DTS High Resolution Audio, the player can only output the DTS core via PCM, meaning you only get a compressed, 5.1-channel signal. The player doesn’t provide analog multichannel sound.

Now for the listening test: in the live Nine Inch Nails song “The Hand That Feeds” (Dolby TrueHD), the playback stands out from traditional Dolby Digital varieties with greater precision, deep bass dynamics, and treble resolution. The internally decoded PCM audio can maintain this level, so long as you remember to increase the volume on your receiver, since this signal outputs four decibels quieter.

It’s rather unusual that the Harman/Kardon outputs Dolby TrueHD via S/PDIF as newly encoded DTS instead of as conventional Dolby Digital sound. But the unbelievable part is this: The new DTS signal sounds more dynamic, and finer in the treble frequencies, than the genuine Dolby Digital track, which is always present on the disc in addition to a TrueHD track. In any case, this advantage is only significant with older receivers that lack HDMI. The analog stereo sound impresses via cinch with an accurate frequency response and low jitter, but failed in our listening test to match the quality of optical transmission via Toslink.