This piece of gear is one swanky looker, filled with oodles of style and high tech sparkle. The chassis is finished in an impressive brushed aluminum surface, with the front panel being made up of reflective dark glass .. The icing on the cake in terms of aesthetics is a slight indent at the center of the bottom edge, which houses a flat blue LED. The back houses connectors, we have a single HDMI1.3 out, a component video, optical audio and analog 7.1 audio output. Besides there is also a coaxial audio out and Ethernet port. This player also has a USB 2.0 slot in the front, for all your DivX and MP3 files. As for file playback, we have H.264, VC-1. MPEG2, DivX Ultra, AVCHD, WMV, XviD.

The player supports BD Live, and onboard decodes DTS-HD Master Audio Essential, Dolby True HD. The player takes about 7 seconds to load from disc insert to welcome screen, which is decently fast. The UI is very well designed and non-tacky. We checked out DVE test disc, Ratatouille and The last Samurai Blu-ray discs and were quite impressed by the cutting edge clarity. In both static and moving images we hardly saw any traces of noise and jaggy line artifacts, but it was not purely absent. After motion, we gauged straight up color performance, which was visually very vivid, and contained a level of saturation that really pleased the eye.