Review on LG BD530 1080p Network Blu-ray Disc Player: A Revolutionary 2010 Model for Ultimate Home Entertainment by Billy Berry

Edit: 02/02/2012 This has become a real stinker. It plays Blu-ray well, but doesn't seem to play about half of the DVDs we've put in it. I tried cleaning the device and couldn't see any improvement. I'm disappointed he went potty. Downgraded to 2 stars because it plays Blu-ray discs well.************************************ **** *** ****** *** I only bought it as a Blu-ray and DVD player, so I won't go into the network features. I have an LG TV with all the networking stuff and more so I'm not going to use those things on the player. Out of the box, the Blu-ray portion works great. It was dead easy to set up; Unplug, plug in and connect to your TV via HDMI. I turned on Star Trek and it looked amazing. Then I tested some DVDs. To my surprise, they looked very bad. This Blu-ray player replaces Sony's upconverted DVD player so I knew what quality I could get from my 1080p DVDs. I was very disappointed. At this point I connected the player to the internet with the idea of updating its drivers and software to see if that would fix the DVD playback issues. I was able to get an IP address, but neither internet nor updates worked. At this point I was ready to send the device back. I thought there might be a problem with the LG servers so I left the problem overnight. The next day, after *several* attempts, I was able to update the drivers and software. This process took about 30 minutes after the download started to work. After the update, DVD playback looked very good, comparable to my Sony. I was relieved but also a little frustrated that it took so much effort to actually get the update to work. Conclusion: The player plays Blu-ray and DVD flawlessly for a very reasonable price after updating the software and drivers. LG needs to improve software downloads. I also had issues with their updates on my TV but once the update is downloaded everything works great. I would have given this player 5 stars instead of 4 but its poor software update process blew it away.