David Neiger04 July 2008, 1:00 PM
A basic Blu-ray player which does the job but lacks the bells and whistles.
Appearance wise, the Sharp BDHP20X is more reminiscent of a
90’s VCR rather than a stylish 21st century Blu-ray player. The front of the
unit has a reflective silvery panel with a small blue LED display, a few small
indicator lights, a power switch and a slot on the top right hand side for the
discs.
Setup was very straightforward with the player automatically detecting the
correct output for our test panel. The setup menu uses picture icons and is
reasonably easy to navigate.
Powering up the unit reveals two circle indicator lights
that flash when the disc is being loaded and change colour to indicate the type
of disc being played. Thankfully you can turn these indicators off from the
setup menus because in our opinion they are tacky and would be distracting in a
home theatre room.
The remote control is large and chunky which means it is
large enough to easily accommodate all of the buttons but it does not fit
nicely in the hand. The lack of backlight makes it hard to use the remote in a
dark home theatre room and its design looks dated.
At the back of the unit is the usual range of connectors
including HDMI, coax and optical digital audio, 5.1 channel analogue audio,
component video, S-Video and composite video with stereo analogue audio. There
is also a USB slot marked service which can be used to upgrade the firmware.
Whilst this player is not the cheapest Blu-ray unit currently on the market, it
is one of the most basic. It plays Blu-ray, most DVD and CD audio discs and
that’s about it. There is no Ethernet port, support for other high definition
video sources (such as SD cards or streaming media) or support for Blu-ray
Profile 1.1 (picture in picture).
Most Blu-ray format discs are supported including BD-RE (Version 2.1) and BD-R
(Version 1.1) but not BD-RE DL (double layer rewriteable). DVD support is
reasonable but the unit does not support DVD-RAM or DVD+DL (only DVD-DL). CD
support is poor being limited to non-copy protected CD audio only.
Unfortunately the BDHP20X does not support MP3, WMA,
DVD-Audio, photo CD, video CD, DivX or other high resolution formats such as
AVCHD.
Audio support is reasonable but incomplete. All 5.1 formats
are supported but 7.1 playback is limited to the Dolby formats only (Dolby
Digital Plus and lossless Dolby True HD). DTS-HD Master Audio is not supported
so you would only hear standard DTS or Dolby 5.1 audio if Dolby True HD was not
available on your disc.
On the positive side, the unit does have a special standby
mode which effectively puts the unit to sleep so when you wake it up again disc
playback resumes within 10 seconds. However, this does use more power than
simply turning the unit off.
The player supports full 1080p/24 frame output on compatible
televisions and Aquos Link to control Sharp televisions. Picture quality
is acceptable but not brilliant. One of the first things we noticed was the
picture was comparatively noisy and colour gradients were not smooth. We ran
tests from our Silicon Optix test disc which confirm a noisy picture and fair
but not outstanding jaggies and smoothing. DVD upscaling is offered by the
unit but leaves a lot to be desired with upscaled DVDs lacking sharpness and
definition.
Playback control felt sluggish as there was a noticeable lag
between pressing a button on the remote and having the player respond. This can
be annoying if you are attempting to scan through a movie as it is easy to
overshoot where you want to resume playback from.
The unit is also DVD region locked which means that if you
attempt to play a DVD from overseas, the BDHP20X will simply reject the disc
and display incompatible disc format.
If we were reviewing this player last year we would not be
so critical of it, however things have moved on and this player seems to be
stuck in a timewarp. If you can pick one up at a good price you will get a good
basic Blu-ray player that doesn’t do anything fancy.