The LG BD 390 is a Blu-ray player, released in summer 2009 and currently selling for around 200 GBP.

Florian Friedrich, tested on January 4, 2010

Quiet, fast, and economical.
YouTube access.
Easy multimedia playback via LAN.
Perfect film picture with true colour-management.
Versatile HD-audio output.

Weaknesses in DVD de-interlacing.

The BD 390 is a superb device that really can do everything: It delivers a first-class, extremely sharp, and colour-optimised Blu-ray picture, as well as YouTube videos and other multimedia treats. What’s more, the developers have provided every interface the modern home-cinema needs, and the player is quiet and economical.

Multimedia

Equipped for all situations — the BD 390 even offers a 7.1-channel, analogue-cinch output.

The older LG BD 370 could already boast impressive multimedia features — we were especially pleased with the YouTube access and straightforward operation. The BD 390 followed just a few months later, adding an analogue, 7.1-channel output, DLNA, and wireless streaming to an already attractive set of features. And, as we found out, the whole package is a treat to work with. Particularly impressive were the DLNA compatibility and tidy menu structure, which guarantee excellent user-friendliness.

Network playback works with videos in the DivX, DivX HD, and AVCHD formats, but lacks support for the WMV HD and VC-1 codecs. When playing back photos over the network, bear in mind, that these look better with the HDMI output set to YUV than to RGB. The USB input also allows playback of MP3 music and DivX videos, but clips very bright and very dark content in photos.

Other Features and Operation

Crazy: The BD 390 is the first Blu-ray player to permit user-adjustment of individual primary and secondary colours. With this capability, you can correct for colour errors of connected displays, for example.

We’re very impressed with the 13 video controls, six of which adjust the saturation of primary and secondary colours. These work for both HDMI colour spaces (RGB and YUV) and allow the player to compensate for colour errors in the connected display — regardless of whether the source material is a Blu-ray, a DVD, or a network video. It’s only photos that miss out on this great function.

For example: The BD 390 manages to remedy the incorrect HDTV colour decoding of the aging Optoma HD 70, a DLP projector. It subtly reduces the intensity of the HD 70’s exaggerated greens and adds zest to the otherwise pale reds — the projector’s picture moves up an entire league!

The Korean player also helps the user tackle the poor red components often observed in aging projector lamps. It’ll even take on displays with an extended colour space, thanks to its colour-saturation controls. Quiet fans and low power consumption add to these strengths, making the BD 390 an extremely attractive piece of kit.

Practical: A flap conceals the rarely used number pad.

Picture Quality

Blu-ray:

The BD 390’s video frequency response is perfect via HDMI.

If you select the “User” mode, all 13 video controls stand at the ready; here, the test model also displayed blacker-than-black and whiter-than-white levels correctly. In the RGB colour space, the player displays colours correctly, but clips the darkest bars of the “pluge” test pattern used for setting a display’s brightness. If, on the other hand, you select the YUV colour space, there’s not even the slightest cause for complaint.

De-interlacing of 1080i material is excellent on the LG, except for the occasional ghost image or comb effect in the extremely fast camera pans on our test disc. In 1080p material, however, we couldn’t track down a single error, no matter how slight.

DVD:
Here, we come face to face with this all-rounder’s single — small — weakness: DVD playback is slightly better on some competing models. In some cases, although these are rare, the picture even suffers from flicker. Nevertheless, the BD 390 delivers accurate and — overall — largely flicker-free DVD playback. Concert DVDs or documentaries, as opposed to films, never trip up the player’s automatic film-mode detection.

Sound Quality

The LG BD 390’s audio-frequency response exhibits only slight deviations.

Excellent: HD-audio output turns out to be extremely versatile on the BD 390 — you can choose whether the player outputs HD sound as an analogue, PCM, or bitstream signal. But we recommend you forget about the analogue output, since the speaker setup lacks sufficiently fine adjustment — there’s no delay-correction setting, for example. Praiseworthy, on the other hand, is the LG’s ability to convert Dolby Digital Plus and TrueHD into newly encoded DTS audio for receivers that lack an HDMI input.