MVBD2510 Build Quality, Use and Firmware

The MVBD2510 is one of the most inexpensive Blu-ray players to hit store shelves in 2008. It's an attractive player and certainly looks good in the living room. The trouble is, this player offers only mediocre playback quality of both DVDs and BD content. It will certainly play back your new high definition Blu-ray discs, but will do so with sloppy video processing that will leave you wishing you had paid a little extra for a more capable player. For those fond of comical irony, the new Memorex logo is more than a little similar to the animated "loading" icon found in the Firefox web browser - appropriate since this player will have you waiting more than a little for basic functions.

Build Quality and Use

The packaging of the Memorex MVBD2510 is unique in that it gives the user an "experience" when opening up the box. Presented to the consumer are a blue insert box with a centrally-contained package which houses the user manual and a quick setup guide. The setup guide is largely pictorial in nature and does a decent job of instructing even the most novice of users in the art of making the best possible connection (something they illustrate with a green "Best" designation). The BD player comes with basic AV cables, a standard non-backlit remote control and the user manual and quick start guide. The power cable isn't removable, nor should we expect it to be at this price point.

The front of the unit is almost bisected into two levels, with the tray and buttons located on a dark gray, brushed metal top section and the VFD display and indicators shown below in a piano black glassy finish. A USB port is included on the bottom right and is protected by a plastic door that slides down when the port is not in use. We'll cover USB later in the review, but the connector is designed for flash drives so that the MVBD2510 can play back music, videos and photos.

In addition to HDMI, the connections on the back of the Memorex include 5.1 analogue audio outputs (not 7.1), coaxial and optical S/PDIF digital outputs, component video, S-video and composite video outputs. There is also a separate pair of stereo left/right output outputs which always contain mixed down audio. This is good for users who do not yet have surround sound in their homes (and with how inexpensive surround sound is now, we expect those numbers to be dwindling).

We opened up the chassis and found it to be very basic, with a smallish, but adequate, power supply and a unified audio-video board. The onboard 256MB flash memory is not upgradable and wasn't in the form of a standard SD/MMC card as we've seen in some other players (unless it was hidden).

See that fan? It runs all the time.

 
The MVBD2510 (left) has a slightly smaller power supply and a unified audio-video circuit board as opposed to the Pioneer BDP-05FD (right)

Comparing the guts of the Memorex to the Pioneer BDP-05FD player (for considerably more money) it was readily apparent that Pioneer had a slightly larger power supply and had separated the audio and video circuit boards. The Memorex has everything on a unified board and uses a Sony KEK-410 BD drive (for those few tweakers starting a spreadsheet).

The MVBD2510 exhibits the same sluggish use pattern as most players we've experienced. It takes nearly a minute (58 seconds to be exact) to boot the system and open the tray for your first disc insertion. We'll talk about the insufferable remote control responsiveness later, but suffice it to say it's not exactly a pleasure to use this player. The player will correctly retract the tray when you hit the Power button to turn it off. It does not, however, Power up unless you hit the actual Power button (the Eject button or Play button won't bring the player online).

We performed a Firmware update since there was a new version available. The version that shipped with my player was 20080908-0C which I was able to update to BD100C-20081107-USA. I didn't notice any significant difference between the two, but I'm sure they fixed some disc incompatibilities at the very least. All of our bench testing, evaluation and testing came after the flash updated firmware. Flashing the player was relatively painless. You just download the new files from the Memorex website, burn them to CD-R and then load the disc into the player (unfortunately, the player can't use a flash drive via USB for updates). The Setup menu system has a place under General > Update Firmware to read the content from the disc. During the firmware update, the TV displayed the playful Memorex logo on an aquamarine colored background (the normal background is blue). It took about 6 minutes and 30 seconds to perform the firmware update, after which it took another minute to reboot and allow me to place a new disc into the tray.