Samsung BD-P1600

Received my Samsung 1600 yesterday, excellant service from Robert Whyte who confirmed in stock and said exactly when it will be delivered. On phoning they gave a CityLink tracking no and (for once!) it arrived on the morning of the day promised.

Clunky when reading discs, lightweight panels, exactly what you would expect of a player sub-£300. But this is £150, setup to 1080p / 24 frame Movie mode / re-encode all sound formats to DTS 1500 bps (Optical) easily made within a couple of minutes.

Quick test of 3 Blu-Rays I have, where are these long loading times I'd been expecting! Obviously much improved from earlier models, glad I didnt go for the Denon 3800 at this stage. Tried 30 minutes each of Foo Fighters, Rush - Snakes & Ladders, and wife's Mama Mia.

Picture quality on all three looks very good, I have no other BRPs to compare with in my setup, but obvious detail and lack of compression artifacts makes it a step up from my DVD player which cost about 30 times more. Whether it will match its subtleties and depth etc on longer watching remains to be seen.

Found colours a little cool compared with my other sources, adjusted Colour Balance on my Kuro to compensate as no colour correction built-in.

Sound into my Tag AV32 processor most pleasing with the re-encode.  Will never know if analogues would have beaten this or not (in a cheap player like Samsung 2500), but it sounds pretty good to me and allows all the TAG processing adjustments (Room correction, delays etc) that will be knocked out when I go to analogues in the future.

Surprised manual (in one place), suggests it can play divx from a USB stick, will check eventually.

Only problem is lip-sync on the Rush disc, but this has been reported as a disc problem on other forums. Cannot be compensated for in processor because I think the picture is ahead of sound! Disc is 1080i, strangely.

Summing up, cant go wrong at £150 for a player that loads quickly, decodes all formats without waiting for firmware upgrades, profile 2.0 (for those that want it) and immediately connected to wired ethernet and checked for updates.

PS - The 1600 (like other Samsungs before it) re-encode high res audio to the maximum rate DTS that can be achieved using an optical Digital connection. For those without an HDMI amp/processor, as long as your amp can decode DTS it seems a good compromise.My amp shows 448 bps for dolby digital 5.1 from a DVD, but 1536 bps for Blu-Ray. Still cant believe that Samsung dont promote this much, and that other manufacturers dont make it available.