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Samsung BD-P1400 Blu-ray player reviewed by Marie Richert

May 28, 2008



Design:

The look of this player is a refreshing break from what we see on other Blu-ray players. The dark gray plastic casing has rounded corners rather than the traditional boxy edges. The faceplate is darker glossy black with the  logo prominently featured in the center of the unit.

Remote Control:

The included remote is pretty good. Most of the standard playback controls  glow in the dark which makes them easier to see in a darkened home theater. There's a directional pad toward the bottom of the remote and handy buttons located around the perimeter. A little more button differentiation would have been nice.

Features:

The main feature of this player is its ability to play Blu-ray discs. It can also play standard-definition DVDs and upconvert them to higher resolutions . Unlike Sony's PlayStation 3 and Sony's older BDP-S1 the BDP-S300 doesn't support SACD. This player has support for standard Dolby Digital and DTS surround soundtracks and it also has support for the slightly higher quality Dolby Digital Plus format. What's more important is that this player lacks support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks. The connectivity is standard for the breed. There's an HDMI output which can handle both 1080p high-definition video along with high resolution audio. This player also has a couple of additional enthusiast-friendly features. One is the ability to output at 24 frames per second. We've tested a few players with this ability and haven't seen any increased performance with the displays we've used.

Performance:

We put this player up against several other players we had on hand. We spent several hours watching footage on these players and the verdict was clear: all the players we looked at offered extremely similar image quality. Despite there being tons of very detailed scenes we found the players to be nearly equally sharp. Every time we thought we noticed a difference we'd watch it on the other player and noticed that it was there too. We decided to move on to the Mission: Impossible III disc and found more of the same. This player and indeed none of the Blu-ray players we've tested so far cannot output 1080p at 24 frames per second (1080p/24).

 

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Rating:

4 Blu-ray rating

 

Review sent in by Marie Richert.  Thanks!  Send in your reviews to Admin@buyblurayplayers.com

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New Blu-ray player Sigmatek BR-1000 reviewed by Lucie Bozack.

May 28, 2008



I have a Samsung BD-P1000, Sigmatek BR-1000, and PS3. In the 10 days that I've had this player, it's done a excellent job on video and audio quality. I'm playing it on a 46" Vizio connected through HDMI. I've never had any of the stutters or other audio/video glitches that others have mentioned.  I can say right off that Panasonic has taken the sting out of the higher price of Blu-Ray players with a good offering of features you won't find in other models. The BR players are all updatable so it's possible to play the latest movies. However, this player has a VERY bad failure mode and upgrade procedure. But once you get that 1080p flat screen there's just no other way to watch video. Even with the problem it is worth getting this player for 1080p picures.

I have only had significant problems with one disk that I own and that was "Lord of War". It played the first 3/4 of the movie just fine and then started freezing up every 1-2 minutes making the movie unwatchable.  For those who wonder if it will play homemade Blu-Ray DVDs I can report that I have sucessfully created a Blu-Ray DVD with menus on a 25G Single Layer BD-RE (Rewritable) disk using the LG GGW-H20L burner.  One drawback that keeps this unit from being perfect is no ethernet connectability for firmware upgrading. It is my opinion that this player was released prematurely based on its feature set. This player did a great job on the Bluray compatibility & picture quality and the DVD upconversion quality.  This player is good as far as disks that work on it but it does not support 48kHz/24-bit HD true sound that few blu-ray disks come with.  The sound will pop out of sync with the visual. Before you buy call the manufacturer and ask if they have solved this problem by issuing a firmware (disk to put in the machine to update the harddrive) or not.

Upconversion on this player is pretty good, which is essential if you have vast library of DVDs.  I figured instead of spending $50 or so on upconvert DVD player to work with my new TV, I decided to go directly to Blu-Ray, since the Blu-Ray is now standard of HD DVDs. The Upconversion of standard definition DVDs is defnitely a strong point for this player.  Overall, I found this player to be competent Blu-ray player and a great upconverting DVD player.

Rating:

5 Blu-ray rating

 

 

Review sent in by Lucie Bozack. Thanks! Send in your reviews to Admin@buyblurayplayers.com

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Ethan Petallas from Athens has sent in review of Daewoo DBP-1000 Blu-ray player

May 27, 2008



I obtained this player with the1.4 firmware and it was great. Yes, it did take a very long time to load Predator  - almost 3 full minutes. That is due to the disc heavily using Java (BD-J) for interactivity. Few days ago I flash updated the firmware to 2.60 in about 14 minutes. See manufacturer's web site for the firmware and carefully follow the instructions. They will even provide you with the disc.
I purchased a 46" HDTV and a Toshiba HD-A20 1080p HD DVD Player player along with this Blu-ray Disc Player. I wanted to see the results of both Blu-Ray and HD DVD before investing in more expensive units. Setting up was quick and straightforward - no problems here. I noticed that this Sony player weighs much less than the Toshiba HD-A20 HD DVD player.  There needs to be a ethernet port or some other way to access updates online direct to this player, a wireless method possibly? My Toshiba HD DVD player has the CAT-5 ethernet port and it makes updating (not exactly simple) more flexible.  Manufacture's website offers the image (ISO) burn to DVDR method for updating, but this seems counter productive at best. One other thing I immediately noticed is how whisper quiet this player is. There is no noticeable fan noise whatsoever. Compare this to the Toshiba HD-XA2 fan, which has a sound resembling the whine of a tiny fighter jet.

The remote control seems to be totally out of sync with the unit - making the entire thing very sluggish. Mine failed to work after 5 months of ownership. I had it replaced under warranty with a refurbished one and that one does not work either.  We have DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 coming out now. The color quality is exceptional and images are very sharp. When playing regular DVD's the images aren't as sharp naturally.  There is slight fan noise during dvd playback, which was only noticeable with the tv turned off. While the movie is playing, I couldn't hear the fan at all. The display on the front is a gray-blue. There are 4 brightness settings (High-Med-Low-Off), which can be accessed with one button on the top top of the remote. Very convenient. With the display turned off, this is a very nice viewing experience. There is also an additional display button on the remote, which tells you the TRT of the disc, which chapter you are watching, time remaining in the chapter, and bit rate.

 

Rating:

3 blu-ray rating

 

 

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Daewoo DBP-1000 Blu-ray player reviewed by Steve Vigil

May 27, 2008



Design:

The front of the unit is all glossy black with a thin strip of silver along the bottom. To the far left is the Power button surrounded by a blue light which unfortunately can't be turned off in the settings menu. All the graphics are in high-def and are easy enough to navigate.

Remote Control:

The remote for this player is probably the best remote we've seen packaged with a high-definition disc player.  It largely resembles the Philips TV remotes--which we're not huge fans of--but this one gets a lot right. At the very top is an illuminated strip of device names and you select which device you want the remote to control by scrolling through them with the Select button.  The directional pad is easy to use with the appropriate buttons littered around it. There are convenient rocker buttons to control TV channels and volume.  We also like the way the remote felt in our hand; it has some weight to it and feels solid.

Features:

This player is one of the first player to be Blu-ray profile 1.1 compliant. This means it meets several hardware requirements including 64kb of onboard persistent memory 256MB of local storage and both secondary audio and video decoders.This should allow the player to play picture-in-picture commentary and perhaps take advantage of other interactive features available on Blu-ray Profile 1.1 discs--none of which are on the market yet. This player is one of the first Blu-ray players that can output both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks in bitstream format. The connectivity package on the player is very good. The main video output is naturally HDMI which is capable of outputting both 1080p video signals as well as HD audio.

Performance:

We started off our test looking at Corpse Bride in 1080p on this player. This disc is extremely sharp and any difference in detail between the players should be visible. We found it very difficult to find any significant differences in the image quality between the players. This is even more so the case when watching at a standard viewing distance of around 8 feet for a 50-inch plasma. We took a look at some test patterns on Silicon Image's HQV test suite on Blu-ray in 1080p mode on both players. Like we said before there's really very little difference in Blu-ray performance among all Blu-ray players.

 Rating:

3 blu-ray rating

 

Review sent in by Steve Vigil.  Thanks!  Send in your reviews to Admin@buyblurayplayers.com

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New Blu-ray player Daewoo DBP-2000 reviewed by John Freitag.

May 27, 2008



I purchased a Denon DVD-3800BD, Pioneer BDP-95FD, and PS3. In the 1 week that I've had this player, it's done a fine job on video and audio quality. I'm playing it on a 45" Sony connected through HDMI. I've never had any of the stutters or other audio/video glitches that others have mentioned.  This player 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. The BR players are all updatable so it's possible to play the latest movies. However, this player has a VERY weak failure mode and upgrade procedure. This likely makes this required operation out of reach for most people on this device.

I HAVE NEVER HAD ANY DISC PLAY OR CONNECTION ISSUES AS HAVE BEEN REPORTED BY OTHER USERS. MY ONLY ADVICE ON THIS IS TO KEEP THE FIRMWARE UPDATED EITHER BY LAN OR BY CALLING SAMSUNG AND REQUESTING A FIRMWARE DISC.  For those who wonder if it will play homemade Blu-Ray DVDs I can report that I have sucessfully created a Blu-Ray DVD with menus on a 25G Single Layer BD-RE (Rewritable) disk using the LG GGW-H20L burner.  One drawback that keeps this unit from being perfect is no ethernet connectability for firmware upgrading. It is my opinion that this player was released prematurely based on its feature set. This player did a great job on the Bluray compatibility & picture quality and the DVD upconversion quality.  This player is good as far as disks that work on it but it does not support 48kHz/24-bit HD true sound that some blu-ray disks come with.  The sound will pop out of sync with the visual. Before you buy call the manufacturer and ask if they have solved this problem by issuing a firmware (disk to put in the machine to update the harddrive) or not.

Upconversion on this player is pretty good, which is paramount if you have vast library of DVDs.  I figured instead of spending $100 or so on upconvert DVD player to work with my new TV, I decided to go directly to Blu-Ray, since the Blu-Ray is now standard of HD DVDs. This player is by far the best picture quality on DVD upconversions thanks to the HQV chip that player uses. The audio and video quality is also great for blu-rays.  Overall, I found this player to be competent Blu-ray player and a great upconverting DVD player.

Rating:

5 Blu-ray rating

 

 

Review sent in by John Freitag. Thanks! Send in your reviews to Admin@buyblurayplayers.com

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