The Samsung BD-P1500 complies with BD Profile 1.1 from the box, allowing it to spin such BD-Java-laden discs as Men in Black and Batman Begins (including picture-in-picture) without coughing and spluttering like a 1976 Austin Allegro.

There's even a firmware patch reportedly on the horizon, most likely in September, that'll upgrade the machine to comply with Profile 2.0. Once that's enforced, the wonders of BD-Live will be accessible too.

Affordable Blu-ray greatness

The BD-P1500 is also superior to its ground-setting progenitor in that it features bitstream outputting for Dolby TrueHD.

Unfortunately, DTS-HD MA or HR decoding is nowhere to be found, which is mildly bizarre considering it was present on the BD-P1400.

Perhaps the biggest difference between this player and the first of the generation is in price. At £250
it's refreshingly affordable, particularly in comparison to the £450 Panasonic DMP-BD50.

I've even seen the BD-P1500 selling online for under £200, which is a bit of a bargain.

Excellent picture performance

Impressively, there's no picture caveat to match the price tag; picture performance stands comparison with the best.

The P1500 can match its pricier peers in image processing both with DVD and Blu-ray. When tested with the Silicon Optix HQV Blu-ray benchmark disc, it exhibited overt video noise – the player clearly has no HD noise reduction technology – but its deinterlacing on the jaggies test was excellent.

DVD playback, including upscaling via HDMI to 1080p, is very good. It sailed through jaggies and text crawl tests on DVD without stumbling.

This player is a suitable replacement for a mid-range standard-def deck, and is a demonstrably better DVD player than the Panasonic DMP-BD50.

Fantastic value

Overall, the Samsung BD-P1500 represents great value.

While I consider the PlayStation 3 to be a strong alternative, and Panasonic's BD Live BD50 model to be a better overall Blu-ray player, it's very easy to pay more for a model which isn't as powerful.

A solid budget offering that'll get better with firmware updates.