P1500

Even though it played with dual-format Blu-ray/HD DVD players, Samsung has always been one of Blu-ray's strongest advocates, and with the BD-P1500, it's now on the 4th generation.

Smaller and lighter than any blu-ray dvd player preceding it, the BD-P1500 is one of the first without a cooling fan. Its sleek, black acrylic front panel has only the minimum of controls, including ones for power and loading, and a four-way button to operate the basic functions. Everything else on the BD-P1500 is done through the remote control and the onscreen menus. The remote is similar to others that Samsung has made before, with a button layout that is logical and intuitive. Even though a few of the buttons do glow in the dark a proper backlit version might have been better.

BD-Live (otherwise called Profile 2.0) blu-ray players are finally starting to appear. But the Samsung P1500 goes without the internet features of that profile in favour of the now-mandatory 'Bonus View' (otherwise called Profile 1.1). This usually means that the BD-P1500 can enable the picture-in-picture features provided on compatible blu-ray discs, together with a commentary.

P1500

The BD-P1500 also includes the onboard de-coding for the Dolby Digital Plus and TrueHD formats, although for some reason, not for DTS-HD Master Audio. Samsung says Master Audio de-coding will become available in a future firmware upgrade. For now, however, you'll need to transfer that format signals in bitstream to a suitably equipped A/V receiver via the BD-P1500 HDMI 1.3 connection.

The video setup on the P1500 is pretty basic, without the picture and noise reduction adjustmenting you find on some other blu-ray dvd players. Other than output-resolution and aspect-ratio settings, there's a 24-frame-per-second (fps) film-mode option that eliminates the need for 2:3 pulldown processing — as long as your TV can accept a 24-fps signal and display it at a multiple of that frame rate. The HDMI output can also carry Samsung's Anynet+ CEC control signals, which allow you to hide the player in a cabinet and still operate it from a Samsung TV's remote which is a pretty neat feature.

P1500

Up until now the best blu-ray dvd player on the market has been the PS3 which let's face it isn't strictly speaking a dvd player. Most earlier standalone Blu-ray players couldn't match the PS3's performance, or they cost so much more that they couldn't be considered good value. Now, with the BD-P1500, we finally have a "real" blu-ray dvd player that can deliver outstanding performance at a sensible price point. Ok, it doesn't have interactive BD-Live capability, but to many people those kind of features are of minor importance next to things like basic video performance and blu-ray disc handling — areas where the P1500 is fantastic. While the inclusion of DTS-HD Master Audio decoding and multichannel analog outputs would have certainly widened its appeal, when paired with the right receiver, those omissions become irrelevant. In some ways, the P1500 proves that blu-ray has finally matured.

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