Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray Player
audio|video Revolution has a review of the new Samsung BD-P1000 BD player.
The review is quite extensive. Of course, they noticed that the Samsung player doesn’t take as long as Toshiba’s player to boot. The player did lock up once for the reviewer, but that was it.
The real problem came when watching movies. I’ve seen this elsewhere. It looks like most of the first BD movies aren’t all that great. It seems to be a problem with the movies, not the format or the disc player, because some movies look quite excellent, but not others. For example, The Terminator doesn’t look so good, while xXx looks quite excellent.
All in all, it’s a shame that Sony had to limp the Blu-ray format into existence like this. First, they abandon Samsung to be the only manufacturer to sell a BD player for some months, and then they release mediocre BD movies to “showcase” the format.
Bravo, Sony. Not!
Check out our new sister blog on Home Theater, HTBlog.net
June 26th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
My understanding was that the current titles are all single-layer. Is this true? If so, it would certainly explain why the movies don’t look so good. They’re using a less effective compression technology at a 5GB storage capacity deficit when compared to HD-DVD (25GB vs 30GB).
June 26th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Yes that’s true. Dual layer BD movies are expected by late summer. Sony should have (a) used VC1 or MPEG4 or (b) sped up development of dual-layer discs.
June 26th, 2006 at 9:04 pm
if you look at the digitalbits.com you’ll see the problem is not the blu ray discs or video but the samsung player. it has problems over hdmi.
they checked the blu ray discs using 1080i component connections and the video looked fantastic. they also checked the discs in a pioneer player and again they looked great. you may want to add an update to the above story
June 26th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
Maybe–but you can’t argue that the current crop of BD discs is at a major disadvantage. They’re using an inferior compression algorithm and they’ve got 5GB less space to work with. It’s a bad situation. Although current HD-DVD players are significantly cheaper at the moment, they only output 1080i–even if the media is recorded at 1080p. Then, if you decide to go with BD, you’re buying discs that will likely be released again later once they get the dual-layer problem solved–and now it sounds like there’s a problem w/ the Samsung Blu-Ray player over HDMI!
No matter which way you decide to go, it sounds as though you’re going to run into some problems–and either standard may eventually fail. I think it’s too early to go one way or the other. I wish someone would just release a combo player.
July 5th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
i don’t know much about this kind of player, i just use some media players!