The BDP-V6000 is a professional class Blu-Ray disk player from Pioneer, designed for the rigours of continuous, or heavy use in a number of applications.
Where is it used?The BDP-V6000 would happily find itself at home in professional applications such as museums, corporate facilities or Universities. In fact anywhere you need a robust Blu-Ray source. It’s also a more than capable DVD player, and so is worth considering if you are concerned about future proofing an installation.
What’s good about it?The back of the unit includes a number of useful features. The USB port on the rear, allowing for local updates introduction, if you’re not making use of the Ethernet Port for a network connection.
The set-up menu is easy to navigate with the remote, and multiple units can have their set ups cloned via the use of the rear-USB port.
Also, when you’re presenting material on-screen, the Pioneer can open up a “Tools” menu that allows for audio / video adjustments. Audio can tweak the dynamic range control and lip sync, while the video can tailor gamma, chroma levels, hue, black level and white level depth, and several colour noise reduction levels.
Aesthetically, the unit is extremely sleek, and whilst that is a throwback to its roots in Pioneer’s consumer stable, it does mean that you wouldn’t be ashamed to include it in a visible installation somewhere like a corporate boardroom. On that subject, it’s also possible to dim the front LED panel down to total blackness if you really want to hide the unit.
Finally, the unit is supplied with a rack mounting kit in the box, which I found to be both robust, and easy to attach.
In terms of performance, colour reproduction is impeccable. The unit provides great contrast, coping well with varying black levels. It’s audio delivery is also of a high quality.
What could be improved?There are only a couple of minor gripes. Firstly, whilst the USB port allows for the introduction of new settings and firmware, it does not provide access to storage. You cannot play content from a USB key, nor can you connect it to an external hard drive. This would provide a useful backup in certain situations.
A second issue is the unit’s warm-up time. Although the unit is responsive to the introduction of new disks from standby mode, if the BDP-V6000 is started from cold, it can take a while to get going. Although this won’t be an issue in 24/h operations, it could be in a situation such as a boardroom presentation.
In use:The Pioneer unit was tested by Chris Fitzsimmons, using The Matrix, to see how it handled dark movies, Up for bright colours and rapid animations, and finally Led Zepplin’s the Song Remains for its audio reproduction skills.