LG BD690 review: LG BD690

7.6

LG BD690

The Good

The <b>LG BD690</b> Blu-ray player has the unique capability of ripping music CDs directly to its built-in 250GB hard drive. It also has built-in Wi-Fi and an excellent suite of streaming-media services, including Netflix, Amazon Instant, Hulu Plus, Vudu, MOG, Napster, and vTuner. The user interface for its streaming-media service content portal is the best we've seen this year.

The Bad

The BD690 is expensive, costing about $100 more than players without the CD-ripping feature. The CD-ripping feature is of little use to techies who ripped their CDs years ago, and while it's relatively easy to use, it's also unnecessarily slow and tedious.

The Bottom Line

The LG BD690 has a superb feature set and unique CD-ripping functionality, but it's expensive and a little more complicated to use than it needs to be.

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LG BD690

If you haven't ripped your CD collection yet, you either have a runaway case of procrastination or you're just not that into technology. That's what makes LG's CD-ripping Blu-ray player, the BD690, a bit of a strange hybrid. The type of tech-oriented people who will appreciate the BD690's solid Blu-ray playback and excellent suite of streaming-media services probably ripped their CD collections years ago and are in no rush to revisit that tedious process. They're also better off going with the similarly priced Sony PlayStation 3 Slim ($250), which gets you HD gaming, streaming video, Blu-ray playback, and CD ripping.

That makes the LG BD690's primary audience nontechies, specifically nontechies willing to pay a premium ($260 street price) for a unique Blu-ray player. That's a narrow audience, but if you're in it, the BD690 is a good choice. Its built-in Gracenote service does an excellent job of automatically downloading album art and metadata, so your digital music library stays well-organized. Still, the ripping process could use refinement. You'll likely need to crack the manual just to figure out how to rip a CD (there's shockingly no "Rip CD" button or onscreen menu option) and we sorely missed a bulk ripping mode to speed up the process.

Even with those flaws, we're not aware of another product that combines all of this functionality in a single box. The LG BD690 may not be the dead-simple CD-ripping Blu-ray player of our (parents') dreams, but it's good enough to recommend if you can put up with its quirks.

Design
The BD690's thick, chunky look seems like a throwback now that Blu-ray players have slimmed down. It's 2.3 inches tall, which doesn't sound like much, but it towers over the 1.5-inch Panasonic DMP-BDT210, for example. The front panel has a sleek look with no buttons, which are all behind the flip-down door. Unfortunately the door doesn't always automatically pop up on its own and the uncovered front panel is a bit unsightly. There's also a USB port on the front, convenient for quick connections.

The front panel doesn't look nearly as stylish when the cover is flipped down.

The included remote's button layout is quite good, but we would have really liked a Smart TV button for jumping directly to the streaming services. Similarly, as we mentioned, there are no dedicated buttons for the CD-ripping functionality, which is a huge omission. Unfortunately, LG decided to largely copy the standard remote used with its other Blu-ray players instead of optimizing a remote for the BD690's unique features.

The included remote is decent, but it could have been specialized more for the BD690's unique features.

Like most Blu-ray players this year, the LG BD690 can also be controlled via smartphone using LG's Remote application, available for both Android and iOS. The app works well enough, but you can't use it to input text in the Netflix and Pandora interfaces, which is when it's most painful to use the standard remote.

User interface

The BD690's user interface has a simple layout, but the labeling of the Premium and LG Apps sections is confusing.

Despite the simple layout of the home screen, the Premium and LG Apps icons aren't as straightforward as you'd think. Premium brings you to LG's full suite of streaming-media services (Netflix, Pandora, and so on), while LG Apps brings you to an app store that carries barely useful programs. So, basically, when you want to access apps you might actually use, don't select LG Apps.

LG Apps is new for this year, but as of now, it's not a useful feature. The available apps are completely underwhelming, with the majority being basic games. Until we see more apps being developed for the platform, we wouldn't factor LG Apps into a buying decision at all.

The design of LG's content portal on Blu-ray players is the most straightforward and easy to use that we've seen.

Once you get into the streaming-content portal, the interface is excellent. Unlike Samsung's cluttered Smart Hub interface, LG's streaming-content home screen has big icons for the various services. It's the best interface we've seen for streaming content on a Blu-ray player in 2011, mainly because it's easy to quickly get to the streaming service of your choice.

The LG BD690's up-to-date Netflix interface lets you search and browse genres.

Overall, we definitely prefer the simple approach to streaming-media services offered by LG over the more involved content portals from Samsung and Sony. Check out our full review of LG Smart TV for more information and comparisons of the content portals offered on Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony Blu-ray players.

Blu-ray player meets CD ripper
The only reason to buy the BD690 over cheaper midrange Blu-ray players is its unique CD-ripping functionality. There's a built-in 250GB hard drive, which can hold well over 400 CDs in lossless format. That means unless you have a truly extensive CD collection, there's not much benefit to using the other compression options.

Gracenote does a great job of automatically identifying CDs, but the ripping process should be more straightforward .

The ripping process works relatively well, but we were frustrated that LG didn't put in the extra effort to make it great. The part that works best is Gracenote, which automatically identifies CDs and downloads the appropriate cover art and song, artist, and album information. No setup required; it just works out of the box once you have the BD690 connected to your network.

You need to tell the BD690 to rip all tracks from a CD every time you go through the ripping process.

The rest of the process is more convoluted. Pop in a CD and there's no menu option for ripping. Instead, you have to know to press the "info/display" button on the remote, to bring up the CD Archiving option. Then you have to select tracks and pick a folder to save it all to. These steps should be automatic, but instead they have to be manually repeated every time you rip a CD.

We're also disappointed the BD690 doesn't have a bulk ripping mode that would allow you to continually feed it discs which it would immediately rip with your preferred settings and then eject, ready for the next one. Considering that most buyers will probably want to rip their existing CD collections in as few sittings as possible, this is a considerable oversight. Especially since it takes about 10 minutes to rip a CD, which is significantly longer than most computers take.

These might seem like nitpicks, but, again, this isn't a product suited to techies who will breeze by these hiccups. It's not hard to use, but less experienced people will likely still need a tutorial to learn how to use it.

Features

The LG BD690 has a few premium features (built-in Wi-Fi, 3D Blu-ray support, smartphone control), but it doesn't have 2D-to-3D conversion. That's not a big loss to us, as 2D-to-3D conversion is little more than a gimmick. The BD690's 250GB of onboard storage can also be used for BD-Live functionality in addition to CD ripping.

Like most players in its price class, the BD690 is DLNA-compatible, which means you can stream digital media files over your home network using a DLNA server or off a connected USB drive. Supported file types include MKV, DivX, XviD, MP3, and JPEG. (A full list of supported file types is available in the user manual, on page 10.) Note that M4V files (without DRM) can be played off a USB drive, but not via DLNA. While we were able to play back our suite of test files, digital media files have tons of variation in how they're encoded, so your results may differ. If digital media playback is important to you, we'd recommend looking through user comments on CNET and elsewhere to see how a player performs in real-world scenarios.

LG's selection of streaming-media services, dubbed Smart TV, is the best we've seen so far. Since the beginning of 2011, LG has added Amazon Instant, MOG, and Hulu Plus to its already solid set of services, including Netflix, Pandora, MLB.TV, YouTube, vTuner and Napster. Sony is the only competitor that comes close, but its collection of services is hampered by a lackluster user interface.

Amazon Instant streaming is our favorite extra, especially for cord-cutters without cable. While services like Vudu are a compelling alternative source of video-on-demand movies, Amazon Instant offers by far the largest selection of TV shows for pay-per-view watching, including both network and cable shows.

Our extensive review of Smart TV includes a chart comparing the major manufacturers' services.

The LG BD690 has the standard assortment of ports for a Blu-ray player, with the modest addition of including both optical and coaxial digital audio outputs. Note that while the LG BD690 does have a component video output, it's limited to 480i resolution, due to annoying AACS rules.

Blu-ray disc load times and player speed

The LG BD690 has a CNET speed rating of 96, which is just about average for a 2011 midrange Blu-ray player. It's not particularly fast or slow at anything, handling disc-loading, Netflix, and standard navigation tasks with close to average or just slightly slower speeds.

We should point out that we choose to leave quick-start modes on for our speed tests, which does use slightly more power when the player is turned off. If you opt to not use the quick-start mode, the BD690 has the slowest boot-up times we've seen this year, taking a full minute to boot up and load "Mission: Impossible III."

If you're interested in all the details about how the LG BD690 compares to other 2011 players in terms of speed, check out our full 2011 Blu-ray player comparison chart and scroll down to the load times section.

Image quality
We put the LG BD690 through our full battery of image-quality tests, but before we get to the results, let's be perfectly clear--we don't think most buyers should worry about image quality when deciding what Blu-ray player to buy. The differences, especially on the Blu-ray side, range from minute to nonexistent, and even DVD performance is very close between players. The only exception is for people with home theater projectors, who may actually see a difference on a 100-plus-inch screen. In that case, it could be worth shelling out for a reference-level Blu-ray player like the Oppo BDP-93.

If you're interested in the nitty-gritty details about image quality, again, check out our full 2011 Blu-ray player comparison chart, and scroll down to the performance section. For more information on our testing procedure, consult our guide to how we test Blu-ray players.

The LG BD690 failed a few of our image-quality tests, but overall it was an excellent performer. We noticed some "tearing" artifacts in "Tony Bennett: An American Classic," but they're in the background and very unlikely to be noticed unless you're specifically looking for flaws. Slightly more troubling is the fact that it failed the chroma zone plate test--indicating that it doesn't quite pass full chroma resolution--but we didn't notice any major differences in color when we looked at program material.

Though the image quality of Netflix streaming video varied a little bit last year between players, we haven't observed any differences so far this year. The BD690 provides the same Netflix image quality as other players, but remember streaming image quality varies a lot on a title-by-title basis, and also depends heavily on the quality of your broadband connection and home network.

DVD performance on the BD690 was excellent, failing only one video-based test pattern. We wouldn't read too much into that--as we said, all the current players produce pretty similar results--but if you watch a lot of DVDs, it could be a tie-breaking factor.

Conclusion
The LG BD690 has a superb feature set and a unique CD-ripping capability, but it's expensive and a little more complicated to use than it needs to be.