Samsung introduced the new Blu-ray player Samsung BD-P1600 for the masses a few months ago. This is a good value Blu-ray player that has all the essential features and exceptional picture quality. This amazing player changes the way you watch TV, believe me when I say this. I bought this player at Fry’s electronic, which had it on sale for $199.00 from the original $219.00. The Samung BD-P1600 not only plays Blue-ray discs but also let you stream Blockbuster, Netflix, Youtube, and Pandora music directly to your TV with an Ethernet or wireless (wireless dongle not included) connection. Samsung also had another upscale model Samsung BD-P3600, which comes with a wireless dongle and allows you to stream media files from your computer. The Samsung BD-P3600 costs about $315.00, ouch!
Lets us dwell a bit into the affordable Samsung BD-P1600. In these economic times, a dollar saved is a dollar earned phrase comes in handy. At $215.00, the Samsung BD-P1600 doesn’t skim much from its upscale brethren. It comes with all the up-to-date features for a Blu-ray player: Profile 2.0, on board decoding for Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio. Not only the Samsung BD-P1600 plays Blu-ray discs, it also can play cd and dvd at an amazing clarity and speed.
The design of the Samsung BD-P1600 is very sleek and slim. The dimensions are about 7.8 x 16.9 x 2.1 inches, and it weights about 4.9 pounds. It has a seamless design front panel, which the cover flips down to expose the disc tray and control buttons. Some might find the need to flip down the cover is inconvenient, but I didn’t find that at all. You will spend most of the time watching shows from a distant with a remote control, which has all the functions as in the player control panel itself; yes, the remote control comes with an eject button. When you eject a disc, the tray will automatic come out and push down the front cover. So there is no need to open the front cover manually. The only time you spend in front of your Blu-ray player is when you change out the disc anyways, so again no gripes here. %CODE1%
The Samsung BD-P1600 comes with all the bells and whistles that you find in most top of the line Blu-ray players. For Blu-ray playback, it has the full HD and 24 frames per second. This means that the digital imaging has more pixels in a picture; the more the pixels, the clearer the pictures. In addition to Blu-ray discs, you can play normal DVD and watch the picture get upconverted to near HD quality. The CDs will also sound great, and you can play MP3/WMA audio from CD, DVD or USB. Or watch your favorite JPG files from photo CDs.
As for connection, I used the HDMI output to my Sony Bravia HDTV and the Optical Digital Audio output to my 14-year old Denon AV receiver. The sound was clear and the picture was crisp with rich, eye-candy colors. The Samsung BD-1600 back panel also has analog video and audio and RBY hook-ups. I would recommend with the HDMI setup. To save money, instead of buying a wireless dongle from Samsung ($80), I moved my wireless router from my computer to the entertainment center. From download comparison, the direct wire Ethernet connection gives better download time and the quality of the Netflix movies mostly connected near or at HD quality. Some might prefer wireless and use a cheaper hookup, such as creating a bridge through a cheap wireless router (about $25); but this takes a bit of setup time. It is cheaper to buy a wireless adapter for all your computers (about $12-15). If you want to enable BD-Live, you will need at least a 1GB USB flash drive install in the back panel of the player.
Blu-ray disc experience was amazing when playing X-Men Origin: Wolverine. The picture and sound quality is a big difference when compared to playing a dvd. There is no wash out picture and the sound is crystal clear, like you are part of the movie. Of course if your receiver handle HDMI input that would be even better, because HDMI’s ability to connect as 7.1 sound setup.
For Netflix, Youtube, and Pandora features; the setups for these features are easy and intuitive. Just follow the on screen directions for each feature. The picture and sound quality is dependent on the speed of your internet connection. My only gripe is the Netflix, which you need to use your computer to instant queue in the movies or shows that you want to watch. I hope that the next firmware (automatically install if there is a new firmware when you turn on your Blu-ray player) will have queuing feature directly on your TV screen.
The verdict: The Samsung BD-P1600 produces excellent image quality on Blu-ray movies as it high-end brethren. It comes with Netflix, Youtube, and Pandora streaming directly into HDTV, which all seemed to work well without a hiccup.
Recommendation: A+, buy it, you won’t regret. You can find the Samsung BD-1600 at difference prices here at Amazon.
Pioneer will unleash its Blu-ray secret weapon in October. That is the Pioneer Blu-ray player, BDR-205. Skip the 8x and 10x burn speeds from the Chinese Blu-ray burners, Pioneer jumped ahead with the 12x burn speed. The secret behind the technology is a 450 mW pulsed-operation blu-violet laser, which is significantly stronger than the 200 mW lasers that are commonly used in today’s Blu-ray players. At 12x burn speed, its ability to burn data into the Blu-ray disc is about 54MB/s. This is equivalent to burning 25GB of data in about 8 minutes, and that is really fast. DVD speed can reach up to 16x and Blu-ray rewritable speed is only at 2x, which is roughly about 9MB/s to the disc. The Pioneer BDR-205 is connected with a SATA 3.0 cable, so no more parallel clutter cable in your computer box.
