Unboxing Samsung's HT-BD2 is much like making love to an Eskimo; there's an awful lot of unwrapping to be done before you get to the tasty bits.

It's 7.1, you see, equating to eight speakers in total, with one being a meaty subwoofer. Plus, the main unit is a combination Blu-ray player and receiver. And its massive!

You'll certainly need to reserve some considerable real estate under your TV, round the back of your sofa and, er, everywhere else really.

Seriously stylish speakers

But that's not to say the deck's a beast without a dash of beauty. Footprint aside, Samsung has exhibited its trademark design expertise.

Clean and curvy, the player/amp owes more, aesthetically, to a fancy sports car than a conventional BD box (especially those from the Samsung stable).

It's mainly gloss black, naturally, and a magnet for dust to boot, but a silver strip along the fascia makes it stand out from it's own shiny black speakers and the rest of the AV crowd - in much the same way that a chrome lip ring stands out on a Goth.

Maybe we're seeing a move away from the current piano-black trend. It may be a strip for now but that's how it starts; it'll all be silver kit next year, you mark my words... Imagine that? Silver!

Limited connectivity

The simplicity in design extends to the rear, albeit not in a good way. There's nary a socket left spare by the all-in-one's own cabling and, certainly, there's no video input in sight.

Two optical audio sockets allow you to feed its amp modules from external sources, such as a Sky/Virgin Media box and a games console, but you can forget about simplifying your life (and your set-up) by using the HT-BD2 as a video-switching device.

Also, as you can't feed HD audio through a standard TOSlink cable, you're unable to get anything more than standard 5.1 Dolby Digital or DTS from a HD DVD player (should you still own one).

Intelligent features

Of course, that's not the point of this system. This all-in-one is essentially for those who want to upgrade their entire home entertainment system to HD in one fell swoop, or newbies to experience full-surround home cinema for the first time.

It offers integrated 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD decoding, and it can route out 1080p24 video for, theoretically, the smoothest, sharpest picture.

There's even a LAN/Ethernet port for automatic web-based updates and patches. In many ways it is 'my first Blu-ray home theatre' in one gigantic box, which is fine. But that's not to say that it's without limitations...

Keeping a low profile

The Blu-ray credentials of the kit are, for all intents and purposes, lifted from Samsung's own BD-P1400, resulting in compliance with BD Profile 1.0 only.

While it's compatible with the movie playback of every BD disc I attempted to run through the player, including the tricky new, BD-J heavy release of Men in Black, there are features that it is incapable of handling.

Profile 1.1 discs are laden with content-rich Java applets, such as picture-in-picture, and Profile 2.0 platters add live functionality (through connection to the world wide interweb) including games and chat - and these are mere fancies to the HT-BD2.

Whether they currently add extra value, though, is debatable. Certainly, none of the initial wave of so-called BD-J 'games' are anything to write home about and, in my opinion, the other touted 'live' features, to date, have been aimed unapologetically at kids.