Digital Trends

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

Features and Design

Like many of Samsung's home theater components, the BD-P1500 adopts a glossy black fascia, a minimalist front panel, and a slim profile at just 3.3 inches tall. Besides the disc tray, only an illuminated power button, one-line LCD display and four-way control pad adorn the face. While it doesn't scream Blu-ray like some of Sony's units, we appreciated the understated look and found that it fit in with the rest of our home theater gear just fine.

Around back, you'll find all the standard composite, component, and HDMI video outputs, along with the more unusual optical audio outputs and stereo analog RCA connectors. Unfortunately, the player offers no multi-channel analog outputs, which even its predecessor the BD-P1400 had. It does, however, have an Ethernet jack for pulling firmware updates from the Internet, as well as a USB 2.0 port to perform the same task without connectivity, or expand its memory.

In the second case of inaccurate advertising from Samsung that we've seen recently (the first being the lack of promised equalizers on their HT-X710T,) we found Samsung advertising an S-video port on the Samsung's spec sheet that doesn't exist on the actual unit. Granted, few people will probably miss it on a unit so explicitly tailored toward HD, but the consistency of the inaccuracies concerned us.

The player will handle Blu-ray, DVD and audio discs, and supports BD Profile 1.1 out of the box, with a recent upgrade providing support for BD Profile 2.0

Setup

Simply plugging in the BD-P1500 and connecting it to an HD set via an HDMI cable will be the only setup required for most users - but we were disappointed that Samsung didn't include an HDMI cable - only cheaper composite video and stereo audio cables. Since HDMI has become the de facto standard on all HDTVs manufactured within the last few years, we expected better out-of-the-box compatibility, especially with the lack of multi-channel analog audio outputs.

After supplying our own HDMI cable, our Anynet+ TV detected the player's Anynet+ capability and synced up flawlessly, allowing us to the use the TV's remote for the Blu-ray player without any fiddling. While Samsung is currently the only manufacturer building this function into its TVs, we were at least pleased to see that the company's effort to make its product play nicely together actually worked as intended (and as advertised).

Blu-ray Playback

As expected, video playback from the Samsung box looked outstandingly crisp, fluid and clean. While some head-to-head comparisons show the box trailing competitors in image quality, we discerned no noticeable difference between the BD-P1500 and any other Blu-ray player in our comparisons.

We did experience some minor hiccups in the player's menu operation: Most notably, it actually cut producing signal for a full second before playing bonus elements from Jumper. This caused our TV to spazz out every time and report a missing signal before abruptly beginning playback, a small annoyance.

Image Courtesy of Samsung