Samsung BD-UP5000 Blu-ray player reviewed by Daniel Cantwell

May 31, 2008

Design:

This player received the highest design score of any next-generation player we've reviewed so far. Its silver chassis and a black front panel combine for an unusually stylish look. The front panel is glossy and is marked by only two buttons: power and disc open/close. our only complaint about the design is that the aforementioned blue light around the disc drive and the blue light next to the power button cannot be dimmed.

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 can play Blu-ray as well as regular DVDs. Upscaling won't make your regular DVDs look like high-definition discs but it might make them look a little better if the video processing in your HDTV is worse than the processing of the this player. This player can handle Dolby Digital and DTS and can send those soundtracks over HDMI in either bitstream- -to be decoded by an A/V receiver--or linear PCM (LPCM) format. It can also send Dolby Digital Plus--a higher quality version of Dolby Digital--via bitstream. What's disappointing is that this player does not have support for many of the other new higher-resolution soundtrack formats. This player does not support either of the high-resolution audio formats DVD-Audio and SACD. Connectivity on this player is standard compared to other Blu-ray players. The most important connection is the HDMI output.

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: