Philips BDP7500

After waiting until most of its competitors had already entered the fray, Philips has now released its second generation of Blu-ray players.

The BDPP7500 promises to combine an attractive tech spec with a low price.  It's available in black (BDP7500BL) and silver (BDP7500SL) versions.

Connectivity and features

The BDP7500's biggest strength is the very complete set of connectivity options at the back, that offers just as much to those who want to enjoy a variety of audio formats as those who want to get involved with multimedia.

For the first group, the inclusion of analogue outputs for eight-channel audio means you can enjoy HD quality sound on an upgradeable 5.1 or 7.1 amp.  Philips has also doubled the number of digital audio outputs for both optical and coaxial ports.  It's something we see infrequently enough to make it worth mentioning, but also very useful when you don't have many digital audio ports on your Home Cinema amp.

Apart from that, the standard options are all included, with HDMI, composite and component video and analogue stereo sound.  The HDMI cable is also included, which is another element that's worth drawing attention to.


For multimedia use, there's a USB port at the front which allows you to access audio (MP3 and WMA), photos (JPEG and PNG, although the latter aren't mentioned in the manual) and video (AVCHD, WMV and DivX are all apparently supported).  It's not compatible with FAT32, meaning it can't handle files any larger than 4 GB, and, according to Philips, nor can it support hard drives larger than 160 GB.  However, the hard drive we use for our tests contains 250 GB and seemed to work perfectly.

Looking at the video formats in a little more detail, only VOB, AKI and MLV containers are accepted.  DivX files as AVIs work as well in HD as though do in SD, and SRT subtitles display correctly, although you can't resynchronise them if there's a problem.  MVK video compressed as VC1 files worked fine, but we couldn't play any of our H.264 test files.

The Ethernet port is designed only for updating the firmware or for Blu-ray discs that have BD Live features, not for accessing multimedia content over your home network.

As you insert a disc, the BDP7500 responds very quickly: from the moment we switched it on to the first frame appearing on screen, we only waited 32 seconds.  The worst offenders can leave you hanging for up to a minute.

Another bonus is the lack of a fan, which means this player is very quiet.

The menus are simple and well thought-out, but demanding users might be disappointed by the lack of options for adjusting brightness, contrast or other settings.  Instead, you can only choose from a series of pre-defined settings: standard, action, animation, natural and cold.


Image Quality

That said, standard mode (which is activated by default) is more than enough to get an idea of the quality on offer.  The display of Blu-ray content is faultlessly neutral, true to the encoding on the source disc with no deviation in colours or artificial adjustments.  We then had the BDP7500 display a series of challenging test cards and compared the results to the results on the PS3.  All of the results were practically identical, meaning the BDP7500 doesn't do anything to alter the quality of the video signal.


Audio Formats

As we mentioned above when looking at connectivity, all audio formats can be decoded and then sent via the HDMI port or your choice of digital (optical and coaxial for DTA and Digital Digital) or 7.1 analogue outputs.  That makes the BDP7500 one of the most fully-featured Blu-ray players of the moment.

Electricity Consumption

Living up to the promises of its environmental policy, Philips has produced a device that is very efficient while on standby.  When we measured energy use, our equipment struggled to register anything above 0 W on standby, so we're assuming the actual consumption was below 0.05 W.

In use, it varies between 15 W and 19 W, depending on the content you're watching, and uses about the same when switched on but not playing anything.