Available since autumn 2009, Yamaha’s BD-S 1065 Blu-ray player currently sells online for around 440 GBP.

Florian Friedrich, tested on December 21, 2009

Excellent picture for films.
Analogue, 7.1-channel output.
BD-Live.
HD-audio output as PCM and bitstream.

Extremely weak DVD de-interlacing.
Quiet but clearly audible fan noise.
Slow disc drive.
Measly multimedia features.

For a player that costs this much, we expect more than just BD-Live and photo playback. A slow disc drive and permanent flicker in DVD pictures add to the disappointment — these shortcomings are anything but state-of-the-art. Still, the Yamaha collects plus points for its excellent movie pictures and high-quality analogue and digital sound.

Multimedia

Unfortunately, the USB connection only allows you to store BD-Live content and install firmware updates.

If you’re looking for a Blu-ray player with loads of multimedia extras, you can safely strike the BD-S 1065 from your list: Although the device has a USB input, this is only there to allow storage of BD-Live downloads, since the Yamaha lacks internal memory. The only way to play back your own multimedia content is to burn it to a DVD and play it back via the snail-paced disc drive. Even then, this will only work with AVCHD videos and JPEG photos; MP3 music and DivX videos are simply a no-go area for this player.

And that’s not all — photo playback also draws some criticism: Although the picture quality is good, we were annoyed by the lack of a ‘rotate’ function. The dated-looking photo-preview mode is also a bit on the awkward side and doesn’t make for especially speedy navigation.

Other Features and Operation

Though tidily arranged and easy to use, the remote control lacks special functions for rotating or zooming, for example.

With its clear design and excellent build quality, the Japanese device suits a classic home-cinema look, and of course ideally matches high-end Yamaha AV receivers. But this Blu-ray player is no replacement for a good DVD player, since it fails to de-interlace DVD movies with the accuracy that today’s market expects (see DVD picture quality, below).

Since the Yamaha engineers unfortunately failed to fit the player with 576i video output via HDMI, you can’t even leave the de-interlacing to your display, in the case that it might produce better progressive material from 576i signals.

Although this mid-range player consumes very little power, it still has a cooling fan, which — surprise, surprise! — was a bit too loud for our liking. The “Quick Start” setting reduces the loading time for a pre-inserted disc to just one second, but also increases the stand-by power consumption to a good 10 watts.

Picture Quality

Blu-ray:

Perfect: The Yamaha’s video frequency response gives no cause for complaint.

At least the Yamaha performs flawlessly in the crucial discipline: Blu-ray playback. Although the BD-S 1065 lacks video settings or any controls at all via HDMI, the Blu-ray picture quality leaves you wanting for nothing: All digital levels, including the blacker-than-black and whiter-than-white regions, match the standards exactly. The Yamaha also produces flawless progressive Blu-ray pictures from both films and documentaries.

DVD:
Unfortunately, the BD-S 1065 quite badly fails to impress with DVDs. Since the player lacks motion-adaptive de-interlacing, all test sequences from films or TV material — without exception — suffered from flicker. This is reminiscent of the first DVD players released in the 1990s! Only static test patterns or still images showed no flicker. Overall, the 1080p up-scaling disappoints, but there is at least a trick to get around this problem if you’re using a Yamaha AV receiver such as the RX-V 3900: If you activate the “Prog. Re-Processing” setting, the receiver can reconstruct an interlaced signal from 576p and subsequently reconvert it into largely flicker-free, progressive video. But ideally, Yamaha would spare us this diversion by correcting the faulty film-mode detection in a software update. We’ll just have to wait and see...

Sound Quality

The well-structured menu provides clear navigation, and even offers full speaker-setup options for the analogue, multichannel output.

Yamaha’s new BD player is one of only a few on the market to deliver the new audio formats Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD to older HDMI-1.1 receivers that lack a bitstream decoder, as well as to AV receivers with only an analogue, multichannel input.

The audio frequency response shows only minimal deviations from the ideal values.

In contrast to LG’s BD 390, the Yamaha offers a full set of speakers controls — size, distance, and level — for up to 7.1-channel audio setups. What’s more, the Yamaha’s sound quality is excellent for both analogue and digital signals.