| Samsung BD-P1200 Blu-ray Player |
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| Home Theater Video Players Blu-ray Players | |||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Ken Taraszka, MD | |||||||||||||||||||
| Saturday, 01 September 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||
Page 3 of 3 The Downside While tough, if not impossible, to pick on the video or audio with Blu-ray discs, the BD-P1200 is not the best CD player I’ve ever heard, but it is not designed to be. Load time is a little slower than on standard DVD players, but I feel this is the closest to standard DVD player load speeds I have encountered and I found it reasonable. The remote Samsung supplies with this player is similar to, if only a little larger than, the one included in the BDP-1000, and it is pretty cheesy, given the price of the player. I would have liked a better remote with backlighting, but as most of us use a universal remote nowadays, this isn’t a huge complaint. I would have also liked a detachable IEC-style power cord to allow for upgrading cords and varying lengths of cords. For those of you with high-end control systems like AMX or Creston, no RS232 port exists on this player, so it will need to be controlled by IR. My biggest complaint is the included cable. If you buy a Blu-ray player and use stereo analog and composite video to connect it to your theater or display, then you need to return the player at once! The included cable is ridiculous and frankly useless for a player like this. I would rather no cable came with it at all. I would love to see high-definition players come with an HDMI cable, but alas, that doesn’t seem to be the trend, so be prepared to pony up some more cash for the necessary cable to get the most out of this player. Conclusion Samsung’s second-generation Blu-ray player, the BD-P1200, is quite simply one of the best video sources I have ever seen. I think the thing that stands out most to me is this player’s ability to portray the texture of items in films. Be it during bright daylight or dark dingy scenes, you can truly appreciate not only what is there, but what it would feel like to touch these things if you were there. This is something you have to see on a good 1080p display to appreciate, and believe me, once you do, you won’t want to go back to standard-definition DVDs again. The fan that is always on during use of the player is so quiet that unless you put your ear right up to the player, you will never notice it. Samsung has significantly refined this second-generation player and the work really shows. They have improved on disc load times and have produced a high-definition disc player with the best control response and scan functions to date. Scan functions have been faulted on many of the earlier high-definition players, but the Samsung BD-P1200 does this amazingly. Offering six speeds forward and backward, the video is still well portrayed, and the sixth level is so fast that you can miss the entire movie in minutes. This is truly a huge advance in these formats, where the massive amount of data that must be processed during such scanning has caused other earlier players to be jumpy and frankly slow with their scans. This player is the closest I’ve seen to standard-definition DVD player functionality, and so close everyone but the most impatient person will never even notice the load times. How much do I like it? Well, I am keeping this one. My Pirates of the Caribbean demo convinced several of my “wait and see” friends that it is time to buy a high-definition disc player, and they bought this one. It is simply that good. You can sit on the sidelines in this format war or dive in as I have and revel in the best video available on your HDTV. Now is the time to dive, and this is one player to seriously consider.
3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."
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