LG HB354BS

I bought this BluRay player because we had completed an extension at the back of the house and made a large living room (5 metres by 5 metres). It does look great and the build quality is top notch. I didn't want loads of wires and speakers everywhere, or different gadgets for all my media needs, so this unit seemed to be a great choice:

All in one BluRay / DVD player, Dolby 4.1 (4 speakers in the modern, low profile player itself and 1 subwoofer), iPod cradle, 2 HDMI inputs, Optical cable input. The subwoofer is wireless, so you can plug it in out of the way at the back of the room. I paired it up with a 60inch LG Plasma TV.

I paid £599 for it and to be honest I really don't think it was worth it.

The menus are slow.

It takes quite a while checking if there is a disk in the slot every time you turn it on (i.e. even from snooze mode) and as we play all sound out of it, you have to wait for that.

The remote control has a lot of buttons and the ones you would like to use frequently, play/pause/stop/fast forward/etc. are all very small and fiddly.

Switching between inputs is slow.

We use the Optical Cable input for playing sound from an AppleTV box, but it never recognises the sound unless you select it after you have started playing from the AppleTV unit.

As the TV and 354BS are both by LG, the LG website said that they can work together and this means you can control everything for both from just one remote, but I've never got this to work reliably.

Another point, which is not the fault of the product, is that it can not fill the room with clear stereo separation - the room is just too big. The 354BS is much better suited to a regular room size where it is easily compact enough to fit and would provide good audio. If you have a large room, don't use this.

It has an FM radio, but this requires you to connect up a big wire antenna, so I don't use it.

It can access your WiFi and allows you to watch YouTube videos on your TV, but keying in the words you are searching on is slow and painful via the TV remote so we never use it.

I think this product has too many features and does not do any of them brilliantly, but if you want all the bells and whistles in a compact, attractive looking package, then this might be for you.

The BluRay and DVD playback, I should add, seems very good.

I bought the LG HB354BS Blu Ray DVD player. Great features like iPod stand built in and also able to attach an external hardrive and play either movies or see pictures through the player. Not bad quality machine but I feel expensive.

One major drawback for me is it is only region 2 Code so I can't play all my DVD's. LG were not able to help with this when I emailed them. There are models on the market which are region code free so worth considering these. I am not aware that LG do a region free DVD player.