LG BD590 is the manufacturer’s flagship product and this is the first Blu-ray player in my labs to feature a built in hard drive. Through this internal memory, you can store lots of content and then watch it at your leisure. I had this player for around three days in my labs and I stored a lot of content on it by borrowing discs from my friends. I returned the discs back in no time and watch the movies when ever I had time.

Another important feature of the LG BD590 is the support for CD ripping. You can rip music from audio CDs and store it on the internal memory of the player. But apart from this internal hard disk, there is not much difference between this and last year’s Blu-ray player from LG. The front face has a mirror like finish which is really shinny and you can easily see faces on it. The panel flips down automatically when the tray comes out. On the tray’s right, there are playback controls for use if you lose the remote. There is also a USB port for connecting a thumbdrive to the player. The design of the exterior is the same but the interiors are revamped. It sports a new look now.

You may not like the new menu system but I liked it very much. It has a floating ice cubes design and this design will be there on all LG products for some time now. These cubes are icons for various features of the TV like Netcast, setup, home link, music, photo, movie, etc. I showed this design to some of my friends and they said that it is a bit childish. Go inside Netcast section and you will see some really big icons. These big blocks are representing different services like Pandora, CinemaNow, Netflix, Vudu, YouTube Videos, etc. You get tons of online goodies which can be accessed through this player. I really liked it because these are all add-on feature above the player’s primary feature of playing the discs.

I tried the CD ripping feature on the LG BD590 and found that it was quite easy to use. Even a newbie will get hang of it easily. You just have to pop the audio CD in and the system will do the rest. This is a good alternative if you don’t like ripping discs on the computer. There are four options for the quality – 128 kbps, 192 kbps, 320 kbps, and Lossless format, the latter being the best quality.

I liked the internal hard disk and CD ripping feature of the player but the lack of 3D support is disappointing. This is LG’s flagship player for this year and hence I expected this technology especially because rival players like Samsung are offering it. The absence of 3D on this TV will make it a poor performer in the competition. The player is priced at $380 which is $130 more than its predecessor BDP570. The BDP570 has the same features except for hard disk. Hence the high price is not justified.

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