The Marantz BD 7003 is a Blu-ray player released in late 2008. Japanese company Marantz released its first Blu-ray player, the BD 8002, in early 2008 for a 2,000 USD list price. This newer device followed in November of the same year, debuting at a more-digestible 800 USD.

The list price has since fallen to just 550 USD, but even that figure must bow to the power of online pricing - some retailers will part with the BD 7003 for just over 400 USD. The same device is available in the United Kingdom, where it sells from around 600 GBP.

• Excellent 24p movie picture.
• Six picture controls.
• Bitstream HD audio.
• Card reader for MP3s and photos.

• Weaknesses in DVD playback.
• No BD-Live.
• No DTS-HD decoder.

A top Blu-ray player with plenty of picture controls! If you have a modern AV receiver with an HDMI output, and if you can live without internet access on your player, you'd better add the Marantz BD 7003 to the shortlist. But bear in mind: it's not exactly the cheapest player on the market.

The SD-card reader on the front right corner of the unit allows playback of music and photos.

Although the BD 7003 is a relatively modern player, it lacks support for BD profile 2.0' "BD-Live" functionality - hardly bang up to date! It does at least support Bonus View, the picture-in-picture function.

The presence of an SD-card reader on the front of the unit further soothed our disappointment - the Marantz plays back MP3 music and JPEG photos. The file size of the latter cannot, however, exceed 3.5 megabytes - bigger photos simply will not display. Irritatingly, the multimedia playback function is hidden in a deep submenu - it took us ages to even find it.

Enlightenment: The remote's buttons store light so that you can read them in the dark.

The six picture controls are something special - allowing correction of gamma or sharpness, for example - and work for both Blu-rays and DVDs. The remote control's "Display" button also meets with praise: This displays all of the details about the picture and sound.

Big CD-listeners will love the quiet disc drive and the "Pure Direct" function; the latter switches off the display and all unnecessary video-circuitry while you're listening to music, a trick that is supposed to improve the stereo sound.

DVD and Blu-ray Playback:
For playback of DVDs and Blu-rays, the player offers all HDMI picture-resolutions, including the low-judder movie format 1080/24p. Since the Marantz also outputs in 576i via HDMI, the user can choose to output DVD video in its original interlaced format and leave the de-interlacing to an AV receiver or TV. This is advisable if the other device's de-interlacer performs better than that of the Marantz - and given the results of our tests (see DVD picture quality, below), that's quite likely to be the case.

HDTV:
In our laboratory tests, the BD 7003's HDMI frequency response showed a tiny dampening of around one decibel, but we could hardly notice this in practice. If it does irritate, you can counteract it using the picture controls. The three-level noise filter and the sharpness control conflict with one another - these are supposed to improve noisy or grainy-looking movies such as "The Fox and the Child". While reducing the picture's sharpness does suppress graininess in the treetops seen in Chapter 4, for example, the noise filter produces no effect. Simultaneously, however, the pores on the little girl's face are softened.

Playback in 24p movie format shows no problems whatsoever - or not, at least, if the TV or projector manages to display the signal properly. Movies appear on the screen almost completely free of judder, and in perfect progressive quality. Virtually never does bothersome flicker disturb the picture, even in HD documentaries. Only extremely fast-moving objects, such as a car's license plates passing across the screen, show slight comb-effects and ghosting.

DVD:
DVDs with a progressive flag pose no problems for the BD 7003 - we noticed no picture errors. If, on the other hand, you play back a DVD with no progressive flag, horizontal camera pans occasionally show line-flicker. For example, a beach scene from our beloved testing-DVD "Six Days Seven Nights" produced some nasty flicker.

The player's picture controls also bring positive effects for DVDs, as we confirmed using "A Bug's Life" - the picture looks much crisper. The sharpness setting only sharpens the highest frequencies, and therefore only the very fine details, to avoid producing ugly fringing. The scenes in the Shire in "The Lord of the Rings" also showed greater plasticity and depth. If you want the best possible DVD picture quality, the best option is to set the player's output to 576i and leave the de-interlacing to the display.

A touch of purism: we searched in vain for a network interface.

CD playback turns out to be one outstanding talent of the Marantz: The music sounds balanced, smooth, and natural - of course, that's what you'd expect from a high-end audio company like Marantz.

Since the BD 7003 lacks an analog multichannel output and cannot decode 7.1-channel HD audio into PCM, you'll get the best sound by outputting bitstream audio to an AV receiver via HDMI; the Marantz will only decode 5.1 channels into PCM.