Samsung BD-P1500

Pros: When it worked, the picture quality from Blu-ray and DVD discs was excellent. Loading time for this unit is reasonable. The remote is great.

Cons: From searching on the web, it is clear that this unit will stop working at some point, with most noting it at about 1 year. It appears this is a known issue for Samsung but they have failed to resolve it. I e-mailed Samsung as follows:

Summary: Doing research on the web I found that hundreds of owners of this unit are complaining of this unit not working after around a year. What is disaapointing is that Samsung has known about thios issue for a long time and yet has provided no solution. I even found that Samsung has a class action lawsuit pending for knowingly selling units that do not work shortly after purchased in late 2008. I have e-mailed the law offices of Morgan & Morgan here in Orlando to see whether a I personally can file a lawsuit or if a class action lawsuit can be considered to include a recall of this product for fixing or replacement. I'll write their response as soon as I get it. In the meantime, in my case, the reading of blu-ray discs is no longer possible. I get a message "this disc cannot be read". I have followed tech supports recommendation of updating the firmware to the newest which is v2.6 released on January 2010. I also did a reset to default factory settings. I unplugged the unit overnight and plugged it the next day, yet no fix. I'm hoping that Samsung will take ownership of this problem and provide a fix at no cost, perhaps with a firmware update sometime very soon.

Updated on Apr 18, 2010

I found archived firmware updates as old as version1.3 at the following site: http://www.mediafire.com/bd-p1500-firmware. The list all for USB and CD up to v2.5. I'm going to try downgrading the firmware to the oldest to see if it fixes the problem and then go from there.

Updated on Apr 19, 2010

Downgraded firmware to v1.3. It did not restore playback of blu-ray discs. The good news is that I got an e-mail response from the attorney's office and they want me to call them for a phone interview regarding my potential case against Samsung.

Updated on May 6, 2010

Samsung released another firmware update on 04/23/2010, version 2.7. I was hoping this would fix my player which only plays DVDs but not any blu-ray discs. Guess what? It did not fix the problem.