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Released around the same time, Pioneer’s BDP-120 and BDP-LX52 Blu-ray players bring the company into a market more accessible to mainstream buyers than its previous offerings.
Equipment
Although both are quite similar in styling, the BDP-LX52 is clearly in a different category to the BDP-120, with more advanced transport controls, an ability to change the output resolution on the fly, and with nicer styling in its on-screen menus.
But both have similar connectivity: HDMI, component video, composite video, optical digital audio, stereo analogue audio, Ethernet port and a rear-panel USB socket for BonusView support. The BDP-LX52 adds Pioneer’s ‘Control In’ connection, to assist integration with other Pioneer products, and also an RS-232C system integration socket. The two units are both BonusView and BD-Live capable, and can deliver all the new audio standards as bitstreams to a suitable home theatre receiver, as well as excellent quality 1080p/24 video over HDMI.
Pioneer says that both players also have full decoding capability for all audio standards.
Performance
We checked, of course. In fact, both players did indeed prove capable of decoding all the DTS-HD Master Audio material we had on hand, up to 96kHz and 24 bits of resolution in 7.1 channels, and Dolby TrueHD up to both that standard and 192kHz, 24 bits and 5.1 channels. Our tests did suggest that in BonusView mode – that is, with secondary audio running along with the main sound – the BDP-120 used the standard DTS
‘core’ audio rather than DTS-HD Master Audio, whereas the BDP-LX52 was able to use the higher quality format. But, really, there was not much in audio performance.
Both did a brilliant job with the usual 1080p/24 Blu-ray discs, which of course constitute the great majority of high-definition fodder that you will be feeding to your player. What separates them is their handling of more difficult material, particularly PAL DVDs, 1080i/60 high def, and 1080i/50 high def.
For PAL DVDs, both did a quite good job. Both employed some form of automatic cadence detection and this proved reasonable at causing them to use deinterlacing strategies appropriate to the task at hand, whether it was video style or film style, most of the time. The BDP-LX52 was noticeably better, but both were tricked by some ambiguous film-sourced DVDs.
Where the BDP-LX52 really won out was with its ability to force film-mode deinterlacing, fairly easily accessible using the ‘Video Adjust’ key on the remote control. It was just a matter of switching ‘Pure Cinema’ to ‘On’, and then perfection in deinterlacing was assured.
Both players achieved an ‘Excellent’ score on the 1080i/60 jaggies tests on the HQV test disc. Surprisingly, when it came to film-sourced 1080i/60 and 1080i/50, the cheaper player did a better job than the more expensive one in default mode. But even it introduced some inappropriate artefacts on the ‘Miss Potter’ test. The BDP-LX52, though, was able to trump it once again with the manual intervention of setting ‘Pure Cinema’ on. That provided, again, perfection in deinterlacing.
In use, both players were rather on the slow side, and more so the BDP-120. It took 19 seconds to open the disc tray from standby mode, whereas some other players take just four seconds. It has a 2.6 second ‘fast start’ mode, but this left the player consuming 11 watts of power in standby mode. The BDP-LX52 was actually slower on this test, taking 28 seconds.
Starting a simple disc took 38 seconds with the BDP-LX52 and 47 with the BDP-120. A BD-Java laden disc took, respectively, 56 and 74 seconds to start.
The BDP-LX52 has Pioneer’s powerful controls: on-the-fly output resolution changing via the remote control, forward and reverse slow motion and frame stepping, even with Blu-ray discs. The BDP-120 can frame-step forward and has one slow motion forwards speed, but can’t go backwards either slowly or frame by frame with Blu-ray.Oddly, the BDP-LX52 was very slow with the layer change on a dual-layer DVD taking 3.6 seconds (the BDP-120 took 0.8 seconds with the same disc).
Conclusion
The Pioneer BDP-LX52 was a worthy unit, despite the occasional operational clunkiness. If you want the very best in picture quality, regardless of the disc, then this player will deliver. With its ‘Video Adjust’ key on the remote control, it is the Blu-ray player with which corrective action for picture quality may most easily be taken. By use of that key, all deinterlacing issues can be eliminated, something not available to many other brands.
If, however, you want decent performance without the need to manually intervene in the player’s operations, then the Pioneer BDP-120 is actually better for the occasional 1080i/50 Blu-ray disc you find in Australia.
Pioneer BDP-120 and BDP-LX52 Blu-ray Players
Price: BDP-120: $599; BDP-LX52: $999
Warranty: One year
Good:
Excellent deinterlacing of DVDs and
unconventional Blu-rays (for BDP-LX52)
Excellent transport controls (for BDP-LX52)
Proper audio decoding for all formats
Bad:
Slow operation
Slow DVD layer change (for BDP-LX52)
MYM: Pioneer Electronics Australia
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