Samsung BD-P1500

Pros: - upconversion looks great to us!
- BD-Live 2.0 firmware has been released!

Cons: - User interface is a little clunky and sluggish
- To use BD-Live after upgrade, you must leave your flash drive stuck in the player!
- The player is low on flash and hangs if you remove the flash drive!

Summary: Bottom line: This is a fantastic economy player for $210 which is what we paid (shipped) at christmas time! We watched Prince Caspian and thought we were looking at a Blu-Ray disc the quality was so good!

About the only downside is that occasionally the blu-ray player, when I hit "menu", will stop feeding a signal into the TV for a few moments, causing the TV to put up a "No Signal" message on the screen. Not smart, Samsung !! Also, the BONUSVIEW feature puts an annoying icon on the screen, and to get rid of it you have to stop everything, and turn off a big chunk of all your displays! NOT SMART, SAMSUNG!

Still, we are completely satisfied with this economy player!

Since there exists NO BD-Live content WORTH HAVING, you're wasting your money buying more than this basic player offers!

Updated on Dec 31, 2008

The other downside to this player is the remote, which has "tiny and tinier" buttons and a weird layout. There are at least 3 types of menu buttons, randomly scattered on the remote. The pause and play buttons are on different rows of the remote! It's easy to hit "Chapter Skip" when you want to FF. I hope you get the picture!

Updated on Jan 1, 2009

If you are thinking about a BD-2500, why not try Netflix Streaming from your laptop using S-Video? I think you'll find that you don't want to bother with the BD-2500 if you preview the quality and lagtime of a Netflix streamed video before you purchase it !! Anyway, if we want this feature we can always use our laptop, so the BD-1500 is all we need for the foreseeable future!

Updated on Nov 6, 2009

We've watched about 50 movies on this player so far. It was an awesome value (only $200), and I understand it's relatively fast (although I haven't had much opportunity to compare). Playback quality on our LN52A850 television is fantastic, as is the sound. I also like the anynet feature that redirects the TV to the blue-ray signal when you insert a disk into the player. We haven't tried the BD-Live 2.0 but we'll be trying that very soon. So, for a rock-bottom price, I feel like this product "does it all" - whats not to like ??

Updated on Nov 6, 2009

Half the time I'm taking the DVD out of the Blu-Ray player to check if it's really just a DVD ?? The upconversion on this player is excellent, imho.