The hotel's interior décor also provide this Samsung with loads of bold hues to get its teeth into, and it does a grand job of making the clashing carpets and walls look deep and rich. Skin and other delicate tones are also perfectly judged, lending the image a natural, realistic look.

When firing out images at 24fps, motion is smooth and fluid – best demonstrated by the tracking shots of Danny cruising the corridors on his trike.

Upscaled DVD playback isn't bad either, but the presence of some edge artefacts and crawling noise is a shame. It's nothing serious and won't bother everyone, but if you want the very best DVD quality then you might want to hang on to your dedicated player.

Booming sound

We let the Samsung rip with The Shining's uncompressed PCM soundtrack, and it conveys the tense score and eerie effects with loads of detail and pin-point accuracy, but it's equally assured with high-octane Dolby True HD tracks bitstreamed to a suitably equipped receiver.

The only chink in its audio armour is the quiet volume level of Transformers' BonusView secondary audio track, which makes the commentaries hard to hear over the primary audio.

A few sacrifices are necessary, such as DTS HD Master Audio decoding, multichannel analogue outputs and limited multimedia support, but if you shop around online you can find the Samsung BD-P1500 for under £200, which is great value in anyone's book, even if you do have to faff about with firmware updates.