Samsung HT-BD2T

July 12, 2008 01:45
Excellent
2.0/5
I am a big supporter of samsung products. I own a samsung LCD TV, phone, fridge, and countless other things and I have allways been pleased with their products. This is the first exception to the rule, as its not at all what I expected to get. I thought of buying separate components ie reciever, blu-ray player, speakers etc but thought this to be the answer to everything in one simple package,and well it sort of is and is not.

First the good: It is obviously a lot easier to get everything you need in box and it also looks very nice once set up. The sound is great considering the size of the speakers and the sub delivers plenty of puch for a medium sized room, and the wires are plenty long to reach just about anywhere you'd like. The picture quality is also very nice, with a 1080p TV I was very satisfied with the image it produced, and needed very little tweaking on my tv to get the colors just like I wanted it.

Now the bad: The load times are horrible, almost twice the amount of my PS3, and then some. The remote is not very responsive, I stood right in front of it and had to point it at its nose to work and could see that with time the buttons would most likely wear due to user frustration. It only has 3 audio inputs and no XM radio capability, so connecting anything other than maybe a game console & Ipod is impossible. Finally the real bad news, it is only 1.0 compatible. What this means is that it will not play some of the 2008 discs realeased, I bought it with Batman Begins and it would not load at all. I havent tried a lot of new disks but reports out there are that many new movies wont play either. I could possibly overlook the other cons but to me if it wont play everything out there what is the point? I contacted Samsung and after getting hung up on twice they told me that a firmaware update was required, so I went online and tried the download only to find that the player told me "no updates available at this time". Well if thats the case I am gonna have to assume that future discs requiring updates wont play for a while. Not at all what i expected for $1200

Bottom line for me: It has the potential to be a very nice unit, with DD true HD and DTS HD it decodes the latest and greates sound tracks, but whats the point if it wont play the movie? I own a PS3 and its hands down a better player. Maybe with more time better players will arise but for the moment I will not buy another Blu-Ray player. For $1200 bucks you otta recieve something top notch, not something already obselete. I will return it and follow my original plan, buy a reciever, speakers and use my PS3 wich will samve me almost $500 bucks in the long run.

- Phantomrider121