Even fresh from the box the LG doesn’t disappoint. It requires little fiddling to set up and has a handsome and easily accessible menu system, and for most, it will happily plug and play. Connected straight to an AV system, the LG BD300 puts on an impressive Blu-ray show.

The HD audio encoding is fairly well catered for by the LG BD300. The Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus means it impresses the ears although it doesn’t have the ability to decode DTS-HD Master Audio. The player will decode the lesser-quality DTS-HD but a lack of multichannel analogue outputs means it is better suited to more modern AV amplifiers.

The LG BD300 also has an Ethernet port for networkability, but the cabled option isn’t fantastic. Wireless streaming would have been preferable for easier firmware updating, streaming and accessing BD-Live features.

The LG BD300 has a few high points: the boot time and disc loading are quite fast, whereas earlier players were horrendously slow. BD players are not loading in about the same time as DVD players.