Samsung's latest budget Blu-ray deck is something of an oddity. Its claims to be compatible with digital media and the BD Live service (the latter even wirelessly) might lead you to believe that the BD-P1600 is punching above its price tag.
Features
On paper this is a fabulously well-specified deck. Best of all, it's far smaller than most Blu-ray players, though the build quality is rudimentary; a flap on its front hides some touch-sensitive controls and a USB slot as well as the disc tray itself, but the finish is functional, rather than classy.
With Profile 2.0 status, the deck can access BD Live, while that USB slot can accept memory sticks containing music, photos and some video files. Slightly disappointing is the absence of Samsung's Internet@TV feature – an equivalent of which is found on Panasonic's slightly more expensive lineup of Blu-ray players.
On the audio side, the BD-P1600 does play both the new lossless sound formats, Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio, as well as Dolby Digital Plus.
Ease of use
Our first gripe is with BD Live, because even though the BD-P1600 is strapped with both wired and wireless functions for the service, neither are perfect. The player only has 256MB of onboard storage, so any extras you download will realistically have to go on a separate USB memory stick that's attached to the unit's front USB slot.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS: All the ports on the back panel are what you'd expect to see
Indeed, for BD Live to work at all, a dongle with a minimum of 1GB has to be inserted, and that looks ugly. The rear's ethernet cable, once hooked-up to a broadband router, doesn't give the easy access to BD Live that it should either. After a fruitless few hours with the set-up menus, which frequently froze and necessitated a re-boot, we decided to rely on the wi-fi dongle Samsung sent us.
It's a revelation. Shoved into the rear USB input, it requires only the WEP key of your wireless router to work. Minutes later it's a cinch to access the BD Live service from our test disc, Transformers, and within seconds we've downloaded some rather odd onscreen features to accompany the movie, such as a GPS Tracker and Robot Status Alerts.
BD LIVE: Although this player is Profile 2.0 compatible, we are yet to see BD Live content really take off
These files are so small, that we can't explain why they are not already on the Blu-ray disc itself. This is not Samsung's fault, but it's looking increasingly as if BD Live compatibility is just not a good enough reason to choose between Blu-ray players.
If you're happy transferring digital media from your PC to blank discs or a USB stick, the BD-P1600 quite happily plays AVI, DiVX and MPEG video (as well as MP3 and JPEG photos). Elsewhere the user interface on the BD-P1600 is rudimentary, but effective.
Perhaps this deck's biggest advantage is its quick loading times. Although it did take as much as a minute to load some discs, most were up-and-running (and even playing) in less than 30 seconds.
Picture
For picture assessment we used a copy of Transsiberian on Blu-ray piped through the HDMI output, largely for its peak whites and contrast-heavy scenes, all of which the BD-P1600 takes in its stride. As the camera follows the train from above, the surrounding forest and snow do appear to judder slightly, but they retain their detail.
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