Review Pioneer may be a well established name on the Blu-ray spinning circuit by now, but the company's deal with Sharp last year to pool their BD resources means that the BDP-320 is likely to be one of the last pure Pioneer Blu-ray players off the production line.

End of an era: Pioneer's BDP-320

The BDP-320 sits in the lower half of Pioneer's six-strong Blu-ray player range. The feature spec rises fairly gradually from model to model though – the BDP-320 offers 48-bit Deep Colour over the basic BDP-120's 36-bit, but step up to the BDP-LX5 and you’ll get the anti-jitter Precision Quartz Lock System. Otherwise, features and connections are very similar. A good-looking machine – slimline with a gloss black finish – it feels solidly constructed. While the higher end models might have a classier build on close inspection, the BDP-320 certainly doesn't look cheap.

The back is home to a single HDMI v1.3 port, Ethernet, component, optical and composite digital audio outputs, and a remote control input for custom instals. The USB port is for additional memory storage beyond the 1GB already on board for BD-Live content. As yet, there's no sign of Wi-Fi connectivity at this level from Pioneer, such as you'll find in the similarly priced LG BD390 or Sony BDP-S560.

There are no analogue multichannel audio outputs though, which may put you off if you're still using a pre-HDMI AV amp. It's a shame too that the USB interface is only for memory, and won't allow you to load pictures or video from a USB flash drive. However there’s a reasonable range of formats supported on disc, including DivX, MP3, WMA, AVCHD and JPEG.

Special mention needs to be made of the remote, but not for any good reasons. It's large, it's bulky, has ill-defined buttons and it's not backlit. This can make things awkward to find – even though the buttons glow in the dark, but not very clearly – especially since the buttons are black, on a black background. How did that idea get off the design shelf?

Visually, not the easiest remote to get to grips with

It's not the fastest loading player around – we never managed to get it below 1m 10secs. Once you're up and running, the user interface is solidly sober and businesslike and if not particularly attractive, it does, at least, have the advantage of being easy to navigate. Less enticing is that there's no picture-in-picture option when you want to access the main menu while you're watching a film – you'll need to come out of the movie to make your adjustments, and it won't automatically return you to the place you left. Grrr.

However, a separate list of options can be accessed from the Tools menu on the remote while a film's playing, including Audio Adjust (for audio dynamic range and manual lip sync adjustment) and Video Adjust (all sorts of things, including gamma correction, white and black level adjustment and hue), plus subtitles, audio track selection and HDMI output resolution.

Digital options, but no multichannel analogue audio outputs

The BDP-320 can upscale standard DVD to 1080p and has a decent range of video features including presets for different types of screen such as Professional, PDP, LCD and Projector, and there's Video Adjust, which allows you to tweak the picture to your taste across 13 parameters and store your settings in up to three different modes.

There's also 48-bit Deep Colour support and x.v.Colour and several noise reduction technologies: Component Frame Digital Noise Reduction, Block Noise Reduction and Mosquito Noise Reduction. It's not exactly clear what each of those exotically named noise reduction facilities actually do, but in practice the BDP-320 proved itself an extremely capable and nimble performer.

Blacks were deep and subtly graduated, edges were sharp and movement was precise with a minimum of jaggies – the destruction of the Millenium Bridge in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince threw up no obvious artefacts throughout its swift-moving, effects-heavy length. Upscaling too proved no obstacle to the 320, with DVD images brushed up and polished to a shine clearly well above their natural state.

The BDP-320 packs a pretty decisive punch on the audio front too, delivering all the HD audio codecs into LPCM or outputting them as raw bitstream to HDMI. It's also a bit of a rarity in offering audio-only circuitry for stereo playback with its PQLS feature, designed to work with a compatible Pioneer amp connected through the analogue stereo outs. Playing CDs through stereo speakers it certainly matched the performance of a similarly priced dedicated CD player, though there's no option to play hi-res surround audio formats like SACD or DVD-Audio.

Verdict

The Pioneer BDP-320 doesn't have an overly impressive feature set, instead concentrating its resources on sound and picture quality. In this regard it doesn't disappoint, since both are very fine. But with other players offering good enough sound and vision, plus additional options like Wi-Fi, YouTube and other Internet content, USB playback and analogue audio outputs, as well as faster loading and navigation, often for less money, the Pioneer may not be doing enough to justify its cost. ®

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