LG UP970 Ultra HD Blu-ray Player Review

The UP970 is LG's first Ultra HD Blu-ray player and, much like Sony, the Korean giant has been a little slow getting to the 4K disc party. Still better late than never and, unlike Sony, the UP970 also supports Dolby Vision, which shouldn't come as a surprise given the close ties between LG and Dolby. Otherwise the UP970 looks like a fairly standard UHD BD player with twin HDMI outputs, support for High Dynamic Range (HDR10) and Wide Colour Gamut (Rec.2020), 2D and 3D Blu-ray support and Ultra HD Premium certification. It's also competitively priced at around £260 as at the time of writing (August 2017), making it the cheapest way to get Dolby Vision support on an Ultra HD Blu-ray player. The question is whether the LG UP970 delivers the goods in general or is it just a one-trick pony? Let's find out.

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The UP970 is simple to set up but that's due more to a lack of options than a slick user interface. In fact the home page feels very outdated with just the option of selecting Movies, Music, Pictures, Premium or Settings. All the Display controls are in the Settings section and the default options are probably best, although make sure the Display Mode is set to 24Hz for movies. The player doesn't contain any noisy fans and the disc tray is reasonably quiet as it opens and closes, although frankly the build quality could be better. The disc loading is fairly fast and navigation and playback is suitably responsive, although depending on how close you're sat to the player you might hear the disc spinning. We tried a number of different discs on the UP970 and all of them played without any issues.

The UP970 will remember where you last stopped playing a disc which is handy but in most other respects the player feels rather antiquated. For example when loading or stopping a disc the screen goes white apart from a logo in the corner related to the type of disc you're playing – CD, DVD or Blu-ray – which looks really old-fashioned. The complete lack of any CEC features is also annoying because turning the player on doesn't also turn the TV on and if the TV is already on, it does detect the HDMI input of the player when you turn it on. This was despite us using an LG TV and the only actual benefit that Simplink offered was the ability to control the TV volume using the player's remote.

Since the UP970 doesn't support DNLA you can't stream content from your home network, although you can do so via USB. The Premium section is where you'll find the video streaming apps but as mentioned previously there are only two – Netflix and YouTube. That is two more than Oppo have managed but it's still pretty lame and since there appears to be no app store, you also can't add any more. At least the two apps that are available support 4K and HDR but frankly anyone looking for an all-round digital hub had best look elsewhere because the UP970 is fairly limited.

MORE: What is High Dynamic Range (HDR)?

At least in terms of actual disc playback the UP970 performed well with the kind of flawless images that we'd expect from an Ultra HD Blu-ray player over HDMI. However make sure that in the option menu (accessed by pressing the Info/Menu button whilst a disc is playing) you have selected the Standard picture mode. This just outputs exactly what is on the disc but the other options will manipulate the signal, which is highly undesirable. As long as you make sure the UP970 is in the Standard picture mode (thankfully it's the default setting) then the results will be excellent with the LG delivering perfect 4K and HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. The Info/Menu button will also bring up some very basic disc information such as elapsed time and total time, as well as the Option sub-menu.

MORE: What is Dolby Vision?

If you leave the UP970 in its default settings it will automatically set its output to match the native resolution of your display. So if your TV has a native resolution of 4K, the player will upscale all lower resolution content to match that resolution. We tested the upscaling of the UP970 with high definition content (both disc and steaming) as well as standard definition content from DVD and the player was perfectly capable with high definition content but fairly mediocre with standard definition material. At least the UP970 did a decent job of converting HDR to SDR (Standard Dynamic Range), although if you're TV doesn't support HDR we'd definitely be looking at alternatives.

As with any regular Blu-ray player we would expect the UP970 to be able to handle high definition Blu-rays effectively, taking what is on the disc and delivering it without changing the signal in any way. Where the player can add value is in terms of the quality of its scaling to 4K and here the LG at least proved to be quite capable. As mentioned the scaling on the UP970 is fairly good and it played all the discs we tried with no problems, delivering lovely looking images that were free of any judder. When you consider how much LG has dropped to hit a specific price point, we should be grateful that they haven't followed their main rival Samsung and also dropped 3D Blu-ray support. Thankfully the UP970 was just as capable here as it was with 2D disc, playing the 3D Blu-rays we tried without any issues and delivering nice images.

LG clearly feel that anyone investing in an Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray player won't be that interested in watching DVDs any more but if that is still a priority for you then we'd recommend looking else where. The player can handle both PAL and NTSC DVDs and the cadence detection was fine but the deinterlacing definitely could have been better. There was some tearing of interlaced signals and some artefacts on the video mixed with film tests. The motion produced from the test DVDs was generally fine and, as already mentioned, the scaling was good but even so, the UP970 was probably the least impressive Ultra HD Blu-ray that we've tested when it comes to DVDs.

The audio performance of the UP970 was exactly what we'd expect from a digital transport with the player handling CDs without any apparent issues. The LG can also support high-res audio via USB and, perhaps more importantly from the perspective of its performance as a disc player, the UP970 can decode or bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. Which means that if you have a suitably equipped soundbar or AVR you can bitstream the audio and enjoy the Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and Auro-3D soundtracks found on many Ultra HD Blu-rays.