Back around the time of Thanksgiving, Rebecca and I got the high-def itch. We went out and bought a 1080p flat screen tv, and wanted something to play high definition media on that television. We ended up on the Samsung Blu-ray player. We read a lot of reviews, and at the time, it was getting very favorable speeches.
About a week ago, we got a few Netflix movies in and tried to play one. A little side note would be that we switched our Netflix subscription to all Blu-ray. Why not? We had a Blu-ray player now. One of them would not play at all. It would not bring up anything on the screen. I thought that the disc was just damaged, and we sent it back to Netflix. It happens every once in a while, and I didn't really think much about it at the time. The next day, we got another movie in. We attempted to play this one....and it played. It played, the menu. I would get it going and tell it to start the movie, and it would act like it was about to play the actual movie, only to revert right back to the disc menu. I sent that one back to Netflix. We didn't really think anything more about it. We had a lot going on last weekend, and didn't not really take time to even watch tv those next few days.
This week rolls around, and we received a few Netflix movies again. I put one in, that we had sent back for a new replacement, only to find out that this one would not play either. I put another disc in there...it would not play past the menu. (Same as the week before.) Then, just to know what was going on, I put in The Dark Knight that I actually own. I had played this movie about twice without issue. It would begin to play, but with no audio. I thought it was the receiver, but everything else I have hooked up to it would play audio just fine. Ultimately, I decided it was the Samsung Blu-ray player. I hopped online to see if there was anything about these type of problems on there. Sure enough...there were....a ton! All of the reviews that we were seeing about the thing since Thanksgiving (when we bought it) were negative! People were saying they had the same issues as us....would not play certain discs...would not play audio.
The last resort was to "update the firmware." You can download an update and put it onto a flash drive, insert that into the port on the Blu-ray player, and make everything better. That is according to Samsung anyway. I did that, and it got worse. That's right...worse. Now, if you put a disc in, it will not do anything. The little screen says "closing," but never moves past that point. I thought the firmware update was actually supposed to update the piece of machinery? That could not be further from the truth. It actually cause some sort of regression of the player, and made it go into complete lock-up.
I have a Pioneer DVD player that I got in 2002 that is also a receiver. It has been great. The only reason I moved away from it recently is that I wanted the high-def output for my new tv. Otherwise, I have been totally happy with the Pioneer. Something that I took for granted with the DVD players is there ability to bookmark where you are in a movie. This feature allows you to stop, pause, or even turn off the DVD player only to have it pick right back up where you left off the next time. I assummed this would be one of the very basic things that the Blu-ray player would do. I thought it would be backwards compatible with the technology of its predicessor. Not so.
It is a good idea, this Blu-ray disc. But until they improve on the technology and fine-tune the products that support it, I will be sitting this one out.
2 comments:
You should just buy a PS3 to play BD's & you also get a gaming console if you ever wanted it for that as well. We haven't had any issues with it & it produces awesome picture & sound. I think Sony makes a really nice BD player too but I don't know how much it costs. A few hundred maybe?
I looked into the PS3. I don't really want a game console though. I get sucked into those things and just play them all the time. It is touted as pretty much the best BD Player though.
I have looked at other Sony models also. Another friend here has one. He is pretty happy. Although, they are still lacking in some of the basic technology that I was talking about in the blog post....like bookmarking. His will not remember where you were on the disc if you turn off the machine.
Thanks for the comments...
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