Other Source Component Reviews

I reviewed the Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray player in the October 2006 issue and found it to be rather lacking. It was noisy and its picture a little soft. We found this was partially due to the content available at the time and partly due to the player itself. Samsung promised a firmware update that would fix the issue. This was released at the end of October. If you bought a player before this, all you need to do is dig through Samsung's Website and find the section for the BD-P1000 (or type in www.samsung.com/products/blu_ray/blu_raydiscplayer). There's a link on this page that leads you through the steps of how to download the update, burn it to a CD, and upgrade your player. It's not hard, but it does take some time (around 15 minutes just for the updating).

The result, in a before-and-after comparison, is surprisingly minimal. With the four Blu-ray players here, there is the softness issue that we reported on last year, but it turns out that, with better content, the difference isn't as noticeable as we first thought. The Samsung's picture is softer than the other three here, but not by much. After the update (and with all current BD-P1000 players, presumably), there doesn't seem to be much difference compared with the other Blu-ray players. In reality, it doesn't matter much, as, by the time you read this, the new BD-P1200 will be available, which has Silicon Optix processing inside. My assumption is that this will mean its scaling performance will be even better but that it will still lack a 1080p/24 output. We shall see.