The Philips BDP 7300 is a Blu-ray player released to the market in May 2009. Philips lists the device for 250 GBP, but online pricing starts at around 200 GBP.

• Excellent 24p movie picture.
• BD-Live.
• Very quiet, no fans.
• Analog 5.1 output.
• HD audio as bitstream or PCM.

• Weaknesses in DVD de-interlacing.
• HDMI levels deviate from standard.

A superb all-round player, the BDP 7300 brings all of the important features and can even output analog multichannel sound. The quick and quiet disc drive earns extra brownie points, but the Philips does trip up in terms of DVD playback, showing flicker in certain circumstances.

Multimedia

The BDP 7300 is the first Philips Blu-ray player with an internet connection for BD-Live - and it's about time! The front of the player also hosts an extremely versatile USB connection, which accepts not only USB sticks and portable hard disks, but also standard, commercially available memory-card readers. This means you can attach the most varied types of media to the 7300 and play back your files - now that's what we call multimedia! Photos display with excellent, crisp scaling via USB.

Operation and other features

Those buying the BDP 7300 shortly after its market release will also receive two free Blu-rays ("Batman Begins" and "I Am Legend"), and the shipping box even contains an HDMI cable - this all-in package means you're ready to get watching straight away. You might be lucky enough to get your hands on one of these examples - keep an eye out for the special sticker on the box.

Once we'd unpacked, the fun just kept on coming: The menu's design is clear and attractive, and the disc drive is extraordinarily fast and quiet - great stuff! No irritating noises crop up during operation, either - the Philips developers have done away with fans altogether.

Practical, but not exactly eye-catching: the remote control.

No Picture Controls:
Sadly, the BDP 7300 offers no picture controls, so expert home-theater fans will probably steer clear. The user can, at least, change the resolution of the HDMI input directly from the remote control using the "HDMI" button - from 576i right up to 1080/24p, it's all possible.

Picture Quality

HDTV:
In the lab, we detected less-than-ideal performance: The Philips deviates slightly from standard values for digital levels and RGB color-encoding. Output in YUV-encoded color also challenges the 7300 - the player cannot display blacker-than-black grayscales. The player and display decide between themselves which color space to use, and allow the user no say in the matter.

In day-to-day use, these shortcomings will only appear to the experienced eye - but they're still not harmless in our opinion. In the digital era, it should be possible to match the levels exactly, and this is something that competing models are only too happy to do.

But that's the end of the Philips weaknesses: The player delivers professional picture quality from both Blu-ray movies and documentaries. Only on one occasion, in one of our particularly challenging test sequences (a slow pan across a woman's face), did slight line-flicker appear. The Philips displays all other scenes with excellent anti-aliasing.

DVD:
In contrast to its BDP 7200 predecessor, the BDP 7300 offers highly competent, automatic film-mode detection for DVDs. This allows the player to deliver a nigh-on perfect movie picture - only very slow movements trip the video processor up, leading it to produce flicker. This occurs, for example, in a camera pan across the beach in "Six Days Seven Nights", in which the sun-loungers flicker toward the end of the shot. The same behavior could be seen, incidentally, in DVDs that did have a progressive flag - as we observed in "Gladiator". Scaling, sharpness, and color resolution are perfect and leave no room at all for griping.

Sound Quality

The Philips only outputs 5.1 channels of analog multichannel audio; via HDMI, 7.1 digital channels output as a bitstream or as PCM.

If the user sets the "HDMI Audio" mode to "Auto", the Philips will decode all high-definition Dolby and DTS formats internally. Modern receivers can receive a bitstream from the player, older receivers a decoded 7.1-channel PCM signal. Both varieties sound equal in terms of tone and dynamics - the BDP 7300 turns out to be a very balanced player when handling sound.

The Philips analog outputs also offer impressive dynamics - but they omit the two rear-surround channels, producing only 5.1 channels instead. With the live recording of the Pixies song "Debaser" on the "2008 High Definition Audio Demonstration Disc" from DTS, we could barely distinguish the analog output from the DTS-HD Master Audio output via HDMI.