Product Reviews

Samsung's BD-P1000 was the first Blu-ray player available. Originally it cost £1,000 but the price has been cut significantly. However, £600 is still a lot of money and almost double the cost of Toshiba's HD-E1 HD-DVD player, which we've reviewed opposite.

The BD-P1000 is definitely the more stylish of the two players. The neat design is accented with blue lights and an illuminated logo. Looks don't translate into faster performance, unfortunately, as it took nearly a minute for the player to power up and play a disc. The setup menu is also very sluggish, with a distinct lag between your inputs and the selections onscreen. Fortunately, the menus on the movies themselves didn't have the same problems.

Blu-ray, in our opinion, currently has the poorer selection of films, although it has wider studio support than HD-DVD. Some of the titles also suffer from using the old MPEG2 codec rather than the newer HD H.264 codec. Video quality on titles is likely to improve over time, particularly as Blu-ray has more storage space and faster transfer rates than HD-DVD. Video quality was

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excellent with no issues attributable to the BD-P1000. It also did an fantastic job of upscaling DVDs to HD resolutions. The player supports all three standard HD resolutions: 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Of the three, 1080p is the rarest to find on a TV and most manufacturers aren't even making 1080p sets smaller than 37in.

HD video can be output through HDMI or component. In testing, we couldn't detect any difference between the two. As with Toshiba's HD-E1, only our HDCP-compliant widescreen monitor would work with the player.

Blu-ray discs can include improved surround-sound standards such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio, or uncompressed pulse code modulation (PCM). These improve audio quality over the older Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks found on DVDs. The BD-P1000 canft output Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio, as it comes equipped only with HDMI 1.1 and not the required HDMI 1.3. However, it can convert these audio streams to uncompressed PCM, Dolby Digital or DTS. Alternatively, you can use the analogue outputs and get 5.1 analogue audio directly from the player. Sadly, the BD-P1000 doesn't have an Ethernet port, so you can't access any of the advanced interactive features on some movies. This is a strange omission, especially on such an expensive player.

The BD-P1000 is a decent player, and currently the cheapest way of playing Blu-ray discs, but it's still incredibly expensive. Price is Blu-ray's biggest problem, and the players need to get a lot cheaper before they're worth taking a risk on. Blu-ray hasn't yet won the format war, and we cannot recommend that you spend this much on a player that could be obsolete by the end of the year.