The Onkyo DV-BD 507 is a Blu-ray player released in summer 2009 that currently sells for around 300 GBP online.

Florian Friedrich, tested on December 2, 2009

Excellent movie picture.
BD-Live support.
Multimedia playback from SD cards.
Bitstream output of HD audio.

Fans are too loud.
Weaknesses in DVD de-interlacing.
No internal memory for BD-Live downloads.

Onkyo has fitted this, its second, Blu-ray player with sensible features such as BD-Live and picture controls, which earn the device some applause. But the DV-BD 507 also earns some booing for its weak playback of DVDs with no progressive flag. Still, we’ve got no criticisms for the Blu-ray playback.

Multimedia

On the left you can see the overly loud cooling fan; on the right, the Ethernet interface.

It’s a first for Onkyo: The new player has a network connection for BD-Live, a feature that was disappointingly absent on the older Onkyo DV-BD 606. But even now, BD-Live downloads only work if you provide one of your own SD cards for storage — sadly, there’s no internal memory. The card reader also offers playback of MP3 music, photos, and even HD videos in AVCHD format. Playback of DivX videos, on the other hand, is only possible from a disc. Buyers will have to live without common features such as a USB socket, multimedia streaming from a PC, or YouTube playback.

Operation and Other Features

The remote control looks very matter-of-fact, but serves its purpose fully.

Both for SD-card playback and for DVDs and Blu-rays, the player provides six picture controls — including, for example, a sharpness setting and gamma correction. The latter is only semi-useful, since it doesn’t affect photo display and cannot be adjusted to darker settings; instead, it only provides five lighter settings. But — at least — photos play back excellently, showing top-quality scaling.

A simple design makes the menu easy to understand.

The basic but clear menus will be easy to understand, even for novice users. Important settings, such as the choice of HDMI resolution, can be adjusted easily with the remote control. On the down side, we found the loud fans on the rear panel frustrating, and the long disc-loading times weren’t exactly top notch.

Picture Quality

Blu-ray:
Unlike with DVD playback, we’ve virtually nothing to criticize about the Onkyo’s Blu-ray quality. In our laboratory tests, the BD 507 could output all digital signals correctly. With the help of a stepped gray test pattern on the “DVE HD Basics” Blu-ray, we were able to set the display’s brightness and contrast quickly and accurately. Color-decoding in the RGB color space showed slight deviations, but the player matches the levels of standard black and standard white perfectly.

The Onkyo’s HDMI frequency response is perfect.

Movies appear without flicker if you leave the Onkyo’s progressive mode set to “Auto”, instead of switching to “Video”. Both progressive formats — 1080p at 60 and 24 hertz — offer superb picture quality, although you have to accept a slight drop in quality with tricky 1080i material — in HD documentaries, for example. With a 1080i test sequence showing cars speeding across the screen, the BD 507 produces slight ghosting on the license plates. Less tricky test patterns display fault-free.

DVD:
When compared to the previous model, the BD 507’s DVD playback has (at least) made a step forward in one regard: DVDs with a progressive flag are now analyzed and displayed correctly — pesky line-flicker is a thing of the past. But if you play back a DVD without a progressive flag, the player displays a constant flicker, which we observed on our favorite test DVD, “Six Days Seven Nights” — the Onkyo simply has no movie-mode detection. And you can’t choose to use your display’s de-interlacing instead, since the player won’t even output HDMI 576i — all in all, this is very, very irritating! Although you can revert to using YUV for DVD signals, this won’t guarantee the same level of quality and means you’ll have to wire up the sound separately — hardly a realistic alternative.

Sound Quality

The Onkyo delivers its best sound when outputting a bitstream to an AV receiver. Alternatively, the test candidate can also output internally decoded, 7.1-channel PCM audio via HDMI — good news for those using older AV receivers. Furthermore, the DV-BD 507 provides a complete speaker-management system, allowing the user to tailor the size, level, and delay of their speakers to suit the characteristics of the playback room. The Onkyo also makes an excellent CD player.