Digital Trends

Samsung BD-P1500 October 14th, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

DVD Playback

No one in their right mind spends over $1,000 on an HDTV and another $400 on a Blu-ray player just to watch DVDs. But since many people still have extensive DVD collections, a player's ability to upscale them properly remains an important feature. The BD-P1500 performed competently, but not quite as well as purpose-built scalers like Oppo's DV-981HD. For instance, we missed the ability to tweak the scale to fill more or less of the screen, and other fine tuning options. But overall, most consumers will probably find that the BD-P1500 performs as well or better as their last DVD players, and more importantly, it gets rid of one more box in the home theater system.

Interface

The on-screen menu for the BD-P1500 offers only three options: audio, video, and setup. While the first two merely act as play buttons for their respective media, the last unlocks a respectable set of tweaks for picture and audio format, language, and even network settings for Web updates. As with Samsung's better high-end TVs, the menus are clean and well-designed, but we were irritated that they were only accessible by stopping playback completely. Granted, you can perform common tasks like turning on and off subtitles or changing audio formats on the fly through a handful of remote control shortcuts, but other tasks like changing from 16:9 to letterbox format will still require grinding your movie to a halt in order to fiddle. To counterbalance this inconvenience, Samsung does include a translucent overlay accessible through the "info" button that displays all possible angles, chapters and audio modes, among other options, and allows viewers to quickly leaf through them.

Remote

Samsung's remote won't win any awards for industrial design, but it gets the job done. It's a simple matte black rectangle with a slight curve to the bottom to make it easier to hold. The most commonly used buttons for navigating movies have been made to glow in the dark, and a directional pad toward the bottom makes navigating disc menus a breeze.

Conclusion

If you're looking for a relatively inexpensive Blu-ray player to bring your home theater up to speed with the full HD experience, Samsung's BD-P1500 won't lead you astray. Its simple operation, respectable performance and low price make it an ideal entry-level player - especially when many major retailers have pushed it far south of $300.

Pros:

• Affordable
• Stylish, unobtrusive fascia
• Crisp video playback

Cons:

• No included HDMI cable
• Accessing menus can be clunky