>> Hi I'm Matthew Moskovciak, Senior Associate Editor at cnet.com and we're here with the LG BD570. This is a new stand alone Blu-ray player from LG and it's the follow-up to last year's popular BD390. Now the biggest change you'll notice right off the bat is the design. This has a much more slimline profile than last year's model. It's also much shallower. If you'll look at the front panel it flips down to reveal the disc tray, the front panel controls and also a USB port. Now if you're going to leave the USB drive in there with some movies or music on there, you'll notice that you'll have to keep the flip-down panel in the down position which takes away a little bit from its style. The remote is also completely redesigned for this year. It has a glossy finish. You'll notice in the middle there's a little bump that helps you find the playback controls in the dark and home theater and that's a feature that we really liked. Also redesigned this year is the player's graphical user interface. This year the design has floating ice cubes to make your selection. We kind of like last year's simpler design a little bit more but the nice thing that once you go into the Netcast section, it's pretty simple which has big blogs to make your choice. Now in the Netcast section you'll see all of the streaming media features of the player. There's Netflix, Vudu, Pandora, YouTube; basically all of the major streaming media services that you'd want with the exception being Amazon Video On-Demand but that service is largely replicated by the Vudu. Like last year's player this has built-in 802.11 Wi-Fi which means you don't need to have an Ethernet connection in your living room to enjoy the streaming media feature. Now the major feature that the BD570 doesn't have this year is that it doesn't have 3D Blu-ray capability. Now that's not a big missing feature for us. We haven't tested any 3D Blu-ray players yet or any 3D HD TV's so we don't know how well the new format is actually going to work. However, it is worth pointing out that the competing Sony BDPS570 is going to get a 3D upgrade in the summer as well as the PS3 Slim which is about the same price. If you'll look around back you'll see that the port selection is pretty standard on the Blu-ray player. The main thing to point out is that the BD570 does not have the 7.1 analog outputs that last year's BD390 have. Moving on to Blu-ray image quality--overall we found the image quality on the BD570 to be excellent. It passed all of the most important test patterns that we threw at it and most importantly it also passed all of our main program material tests. Overall for the vast majority of movies you're going to see, this is going to provide about as good a picture as you can expect. In terms of operational speed and disc load times, we found that the BD570 was a little bit slower than our referenced Oppo Blu-ray player. We did notice a big difference while using it but if you're someone that likes to demo movie scenes for friends you might want to go for the faster Oppo or the Sony BDPS 570. All together we found that the BD570 has a great mix of streaming media options and solid Blu-ray playback. The street price is down to $250 which is a big break from last year's model. The only thing we point out is that it's not as much of a standout product as last year's model as much as the competition has caught up. I'm Matthew Moskovciak here for cnet.com and this is the LG BD570.
