Samsung Blu-Ray Player $269

[mghotbi]

Great deal at Amazon on the BD-P1400. I've been very happy with mine for the last month, but wish I'd waited to save an additional $100.

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-Schadenfroh

 

[blckgrffn]

nice!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obi...ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance

Long post, but I had to bring this in here (quoted from a review @ amazon, added paragraph breaks randomly to make it legible):

I have a BD-P1400, a PS3, and an Xbox 360 + HD-DVD drive. In the month that I've had the Samsung it's done a terrific job on video and audio quality. I'm playing it on a 46" Samsung LN-T4665F connected through HDMI.

That's the good news, and it's certainly good. I've never had any of the stutters or other audio/video glitches that others have mentioned. On the other hand, here are the quirks that I've run into: (1) The Samsung takes by far the longest of my three players to load movies, and simply responding to an eject/open request takes 30 seconds for some reason (even when there's no disc inside). There's no feedback to tell you what's happening during eject, so you wonder if it's hung or actively thinking about it. (2) The Blu-ray movie producers in their infinite wisdom keep changing their DRM formats as their latest ones get hacked, which is an unbelievably customer unfriendly decision. The BR players are all updatable so it's conceptually possible to play the latest movies.

Unfortunantely, the Samsung has a VERY unintuitive failure mode and upgrade procedure, which likely makes this required operation out of reach for most people on this device. Here's my (very long) step by step experience, which I hope will help give you a tangible understanding of what it's like, as well as potentially out anyone else similarly stuck. I ran into this with the new Live Free or Die Hard DVD, which after the usual 45 second or so load process simply hung the player. It wouldn't respond to any input (play, stop, menu, etc), the counter read "0000", and the screen remained black. I had heard about the DRM format issue, so suspected that this could be the potential problem - unfortunately I had bought that DVD on its first day of release and tried to play it that night so no one else had posted about their problems with that config yet. Following the manual's instructions, I plugged in a enet cable and tried to pick up the latest update.

For some reason it didn't successfully get a DHCP address on my network, so I manually entered the network info. It told me that there was a new update available, so I selected download. When the download process strated, again these was no way to tell whether it was hung or actively working, and no way to tell how much progress it had made and how much more it still needed. As a result, after about 30 or 45 minutes I cancelled and tried again. (BTW, I'm connected through a Verizon FiOS fiber-optic connection that's as fast as any consumer internet in the US). After 20 minutes I gave up and went to bed, leaving it to (maybe) download overnight. In the morning, the machine was off but it when I powered it up I learned that it had not completed the upgrade.

In retrospect I believe this is what happened: the download eventually completed, it put up a "do you want to upgrade your firmware" dialog box, and after a couple minutes of inactivity it timed out and eventually turned off. Nice design, their engineers clearly did not try this in their homes. I gave it one more try in the morning, leaving it running while I ate breakfast and did email. After an hour or so the download completed, the "do you want to upgrade" dialog came up, and I said "yes" before it timed out. The upgrade completed successfully, but unfortunatley the Live Free or Die Hard movie still hung the player. At this point I suspected a faulty disc, so I got a replacement from the retailer. The new disc had the same problem, though, which told me that this was a player bug.

Since the movie had been out for a day, I found a couple posts of other people having problems including one that got a confirmation from Samsung support. I called support, who eventually told me that the version 1.2 firmware on the website would fix the issue (hint, you need to know exactly what to ask and be persistent since this person would have sent me away with false information if I hadn't kept clarifying her responses). Going to the website, I found the alternate method of upgrading the firmware that the support person desribed, downloading a zip file to a PC, loading the .iso to a CD-R or CD-RW, and playing that on the player. I hadn't found this in the user's manual, but it certainly couldn't be any worse than the online method I had gone through in the previous 24 hours.

Interestingly, there was no obvious way to relate the "version 1.2" available on the website with the version I had upgraded to online that morning (the online version uses a long date code instead of a version number). With nothing to lose, I went ahead and tried using a CD-RW using the instructions posted on the web. No luck, the player didn't recognize it as a firmware update. I tried again with a CD-R. Still no luck. Still clinging to a tiny shred of hope that (a) the "version 1.2" might actually fix the problem, and (b) the version 1.2 might have been posted to the web that day after I did my upgrade in the morning - a day after a major blockbuster movie that required it was released nationwide, but who's counting - I tried the painful online update process again.

Lo and behold, a new update was available that might be version 1.2 (?) I went through the update, and the movie worked! Wow. This is a lot more detail than you likely need to make a buying decision, unless you read this and say "wow, reading those details tells me that this machine requires a lot more technical messing around than I'm comfortable with just to watch a movie". Potentially this might help someone else who has already bought the player figure out why a new movie hangs the box mysteriously - I would have LOVED to find this two days ago. Maybe Samsung will even read it and start to understand how painful their current usability is, even for a moderately technical user.