ctiq21, I cannot recommend anyone purchase this player. Read through this thread and the BH100 disc incompatibility thread. There are many people pissed off at LG for failing to properly support this product. There are many issues that LG is aware of, but they have not released any firmware updates for the product in over a year to address any of them. It does not appear to be a high priority for them.
For those of us that do have this player, first of all I do not want to hear suggestions to just give up and buy some cheap Blu-ray player that works. That is not the point. LG needs to support this product on principle, and they need to understand this.
I see two possibilities:
- There is a technical hardware problem that makes the unit incapable of being fixed with a firmware update to play newer discs. I think this is unlikely... as software is a very general tool and can be used to work around many hardware limitations. But if there is an uncorrectable hardware limitation, then LG should admit it and begin negotiations for compensation.
- This can be fixed with a firmware update, but it is considered very low priority by LG as they already have our money. So they have decided not to work on it, or only work on it behind priority of basically everything else. I think this is very likely the case.
And with the second option, I understand the position. They do not make any more short term money by fixing the problem. It costs them money to spend engineering efforts to fix the problem. But there is long term damage they avoid with making their customers happy and promoting good will and word of mouth to encourage others to buy LG products.
Now as consumers of this LG BH100 product, we need to make LG understand that there can be shorter term consequences of not supporting the product as well. We can start with continuing to complain to their customer support line. We can try to contact the LGE head of consumer support (email listed on this forum in a thread titled LG Complaint).
Going further we can contact consumer advocate groups and also petition the Blu-ray disc association to investigate and revoke LG's Blu-ray license. And then there is the possibility of getting lawyers involved...
In any case, as consumers, there are options to make LG realize that there can be direct financial consequences of not properly supporting the BH100 player. If that is made clear, and they understand it will all go away if they just devote the effort to fixing the problems, perhaps they will take some action on this product.
My patience won't last much longer.
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