Samsung BD-P1500

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/dvdpvr/0,39030417,49299592,00.htm

Reviewed 5 November 2008

Reviewed by Ian Morris

Samsung has had an odd relationship with Blu-ray over the years. Although the company has supported the format since it began, it hasn't been as proactive as we expected. Some of the machines it did develop either didn't hit UK shores, or didn't last very long before being superseded.

The good news, then, is that this Samsung BD-P1500 player is dirt cheap. In fact, it's so cheap that there's probably dirt out there that's more expensive. You can get the P1500 online for around £170 at the moment, a bargain compared to most other players on the market.

Design
There is a certain charm about the P1500. It's not the most modern looking player, but it does have slightly rounded edges, giving it an interesting look. There are some bold controls on the front next to a large display which allow you to start and stop playback. Overall, it's quite an attractive machine and will go well with pretty much all modern electronics equipment.

At the back, there are enough outputs to keep all but the most socket-obsessed happy. There is HDMI of course, as well as an Ethernet connection which is used for firmware updates and access to profile 2.0 BD Live material. You also get optical digital audio out and component and even composite video RCA connections. The one thing that isn't present is 5.1 or 7.1 analogue outputs, which is a shame, but hardly a surprise on a 'budget' player.

The supplied remote control is the standard issue Samsung lump, which is long and thin, like a supermodel, but about as attractive as the back end of a baboon, like a supermodel. We didn't mind it too much, but there are some silly button placements, like the 'menu' and 'DVD menu' buttons, which are too close together and easy to confuse. The 'system menu' should have been tucked out of the way in our opinion, as you'll rarely use it.

Features
Audio support on the BD-P1500 is good and as you would imagine the player can output any of the HD audio streams like DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD via HDMI. The one chink in the armour is DTS-HD, which the player won't decode internally. That's really not a massive problem though, especially if you have an AV receiver that can handle these signals.

The BD-P1500 ships as a profile 1.1 player, but there is an update to take it up to profile 2.0 -- all you need to do is plug it into your home network and update the firmware to take advantage of this upgrade for free. This process is very simple, as long as you have some form of wired network in your house, or a router to plug the player into.

Of course, with this being such a sensibly priced piece of hardware, there are no bells and whistles to speak of. It's a very simple and easy-to-use player designed to use for watching movies -- ideal for people who haven't bought a PS3 to watch Blu-ray movies.

Performance
To look at the speed of a player, we try to run the same test on all Blu-ray players we review in-house. Using an interactive disc, we time how long it takes to take in a disc and play the opening logo. For this test we use Vanishing Point, and the record so far is with the Sony PS3, with a load and play time of 42 seconds. Happily, the Samsung managed to get a picture on the screen in 1 minute and 9 seconds, which is even faster than Panasonic's DMP-BD35.

We also have to applaud everything about the way this player interacts with the user. The interface is very clear, and remote commands are handled straight away, with no lag. This is certainly a wonderful improvement over players such as the Sony BDP-S500, which can barely fast forward without a letter of approval from Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer. Oh, and on the subject of scanning, the Samsung can move through the disc at speeds of up to 128 times. That's mostly useless, but it's handy to be able to go at 4x and 8x speeds.

When you first insert a disc, the player mechanism goes a bit mad and makes a loud noise, but that soon settles down and once you're watching a movie you can barely hear it operating. That's the right way around for our tastes, so we're not to fussed about the noise early on, especially not when interactive content is loading (slowly) and we need something to distract us.

The picture quality of the P1500 is good, if not overwhelming. We tested some of our regular discs to get an idea how it handled different kinds of material. Casino Royale looked good, but we noticed some de-interlacing artefacts at times. We also felt the image was one of the softer ones we've seen from a Blu-ray player, which might put some people off. Of course, picture sharpness is a matter of taste, so a less sharp image might appeal to some.

DVD upscaling was pretty decent, too. We used Jurassic Park as our test-bench and were impressed by the results. There wasn't excessive MPEG noise, and colours were good, although people did look slightly too pink at times. Overall, though, it's not bad if you've got a large DVD collection.

We used an external Onkyo decoder to listen to audio, which sounded fantastic over HDMI. Stereo analogue audio can be output via RCA jacks, but if you can, we'd really advise you get at least a 2.1 channel speaker system, to improve the quality of your sound experience. And never use those built-in TV speakers, please. Have we made ourselves clear?

Conclusion
Admittedly the BD-P1500 is noisy at first, and it is quite a chunky player. But it's actually very simple to use, is spry in its operation and can chuck a 1080/24p picture on your TV like the best of them. Considering the price, we seriously think this is a player worthy of your consideration.

If you're looking for a profile 2.0 player at around this price range, you're going to be looking for a long time. The Panasonic DMP-BD35 is an excellent player, but at £300 it's a fair amount more expensive. Samsung will soon launch some new players, which we expect to be even better, but they will probably cost more as well.

Edited by Marian Smith