Review Philips has made some interesting innovations with TV in recent years – the Ambilight series among them – but with DVD and Blu-ray it's tended to follow Far Eastern manufacturers, while still managing to deliver decent, no-nonsense players that do what it says on the tin. So it is with the BDP3100, but the impressive thing about this player is the amount of functionality it manages to cram in for such an entry-level price.

Ticks all the right boxes: Philips' BDP3100

Like some other Philips players, the BDP3100 is a good-looking machine. Slim and chic it's also appealingly heavy and well built for a budget device, with its aluminium casing. The smooth black front has minimal clutter too, with a USB 2.0 port for media playback and sunken buttons for play, pause and open.

Around the back the connections are standard but there are no major omissions. There's a single HDMI 1.3 port, Ethernet (just for BD-Live and software updates, but no access to Philips' Net TV). There’s another USB 2.0 port for BD-Live storage, plus component video, digital coaxial, composite video and stereo analogue audio. Ethernet is your only way of connecting to a home network or the Internet by the way, since there's no Wi-Fi on-board.

That USB port on the front is designed for loading media from other memory sources and there's reasonable support for alternative video and audio formats, including DivX Ultra, XviD, MPEG2, H.264, WMV, AVCHD, MP3, WMA and JPEG. HD versions of these don't appear on the spec list but, for the price, that's not the end of the world.

The remote is lightweight but effectively laid out with a minimum of superfluous buttons, though I'd have liked to have seen an 'open' control for the disc drawer on there. Start-up is impressively quick – it only took about 20 seconds to get to the home menu with most discs and it was often at the start of the film in 40s. That compares very well with much more expensive players.

The menu system is clearly and intuitively laid out – its block white icons aren't the most subtle illustrators perhaps, but there's never any doubt about what they mean. The simplistic layout is, no doubt, helped a little by its relatively streamlined features, but simplicity, in general, is a good thing.

Blu-ray pictures look satisfyingly crisp and sharp with vibrant colours and smooth movement. It can handle full HD 1080p at 24fps over HDMI and seems to do so without any hassle. The same can't quite be said for DVD upscaling, however, which didn't always look as clean as I'd hoped, with occasional jaggies and smears creeping in. It still looks better than standard DVD, just not as good as I've seen on pricier players.

A good range of features and good value too

Other features include picture presets for Standard, Vivid, Cool, Action and Animation, DTS Neo:6 virtual surround processing, support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio for HD 7.1 surround sound (bitstream and decoded PCM). There’s also Deep Color and x.v. Colour gamut support, subtitle shift – to reposition text around the screen – and even an aspect ratio setting that caters for Philips’ Cinema 21:9 TVs. Still, if you've invested in one of those, you'll probably opt for a more upmarket Blu-ray player to go with it.

Verdict

The Philips BDP3100 is a very good player for the price, offering a good-looking, well-built device with excellent Blu-ray presentation. It lacks Wi-Fi, the DVD upscaling lags behind the best and there's not a great deal of options for tweakers to play with, but for a first Blu-ray player for film fans on a budget, it's an excellent choice. ®

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