It seems almost inevitable that these two technologies would eventually be married and, for the most part, this is an impressive unit. However, it isn't perfect and its shortcomings are directly related to the Blu-ray player which, while convenient, isn't on-par with many of the players out there.
The most glaring issue that users will notice is the load times. When Blu-ray players were first introduced, the load times were long when starting up a disc. Since then, this problem has been largely eliminated but the player in this television still suffers from it. Starting a disc can take up to 2 minutes to bring up the menu screen. Some are shorter though, it is disc dependant, but even the shorter load times took upward of 60 seconds. We tested it with many films to see the differences in load times. We also noticed that the drive is particularly loud when loading. It isn't a problem during playback though.
Using the player is also a little sluggish at times when compared with other Blu-ray devices we have tested. However, the image quality and feature set of the player are excellent and the player is profile 2.0 compatible. The television has no internal storage for downloaded BD-Live content so you will need to use a USB drive (Minimum 2GB) to take advantage of this feature. The television has a LAN port to hook it up to your network but no WiFi.
The image quality of the panel is top notch. We tested with the integrated Blu-ray as well as an external Blu-ray device and the difference was negligible. We used a wide variety of films to test how well the television handled colour, contrast and motion and also used the Spears and Munsil professional test disc. The results were impressive although we did have to turn off some of the eco-features, turn down the sharpness level and increase the backlight brightness to achieve the best image quality. The unit handled colour exceptionally as shown in the film "Speed Racer". There were no overblown hues although we did turn the colour down just a little from the default setting. The contrast was a mixed bag at first until we turned off some of the Eco-features (which we will go into a little later) but once optimal settings were achieved there was no detail loss in the darker scenes of "The Dark Knight".
