Not so bad?

I’m not sure if it was the first sign of a complete mental breakdown or a subconscious attempt to prove that my life has almost no shred of real meaning. But whatever the reason, I recently found myself in the middle of a beautiful Saturday afternoon sprawled out on a recliner watching Space Buddies.

And for that, I'd like to thank Samsung.

There is admittedly something wrong on many levels with an adult who is willing to squander nearly 90 minutes watching five puppies don spacesuits, undertake a mission to outer space, and return to Earth as heroes. Oh, did I mention that those furry little critters also can talk? Thanks to CGI… I think. I mean, real canines aren’t capable of mouthing words, are they?

And even if they are, I’m sure they wouldn’t speak with a Russian accent like one of the protagonists did, right?

But I digress. The purpose of this blog isn’t to discuss talking animals or even the motivation – or lack thereof – that would possess a grown man to watch a G-rated kids’ flick in the middle of a weekend perfectly suited for so many other more meaningful activities.

So a thank you to Samsung for making it possible.

There’s no sarcasm in that statement. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the difficulties I’ve had getting new Blu-ray titles to play.

In the process, I basically bitch-slapped the consumer electronics giant. That wasn’t my intention. I wasn’t picking on Samsung, but simply using its first-generation Blu-ray player as an example of not-ready-for-primetime technology.

After explaining how the player constantly had trouble dealing with new Blu-ray releases and how Samsung was slow to update its firmware to address the issue, I challenged any manufacturer to produce a player that didn’t choke regularly on new titles.

Samsung responded to the challenge verbally and physically. While conceding that its early players were buggy, a Samsung spokesperson also argued that the movie studios are at least as much to blame for compatibility issues as hardware makers. New BD features and copy protection schemes have forced the hardware makers to constantly play catch-up.

To prove how well Samsung has done that, the company sent me a BD-P1500. Even though it’s not Samsung’s newest or top-of-the-line player, it is as big an upgrade over the BD-P1000 that I complained about last time as Sarah Brightman is over Britney Spears.
 
The sleek and elegant looking BD-P1500 shipped last summer as a BD Profile 1.1 player, but has since received a firmware upgrade to BD Profile 2.0. It can take advantage of BD Live content by plugging a flash memory drive into its USB jack and connecting the player to the internet via an Ethernet cable. That connection also enables easy online firmware updates.

The BD-P1500 hasn’t needed a single firmware update yet to play any of the Blu-ray titles I’ve fed it. These included everything from fairly recent (The Dark Knight) to brand new (Primal Fear) releases – as well as Space Buddies, of course. The BD-P1500 also impressed me with fairly short load times, particularly when it’s already turned on.

With the old player, I could put in a disc, cook a turkey, carve it, eat dinner, make a sandwich from the leftovers, then have coffee and dessert before the disc menu showed up. Or at least it seemed that way. With the BD-P1500, I’ve barely got time to rain crushed red pepper on a slice of pizza before the movie is ready to watch.

And the player seems to do a nice job with video and audio quality. This isn’t a hardware review so I didn’t play any test discs, but I think most consumers will be very happy with the BD-P1500’s output. And those who can live without a coaxial S/PDIF connector should be thrilled with the player’s price: I’ve seen it available for under $200.

By offering a high quality player at a great price, Samsung has eliminated the burnt-toast taste its first-gen player had left in my mouth.

On the other hand, it also helps make my original point: Consumers don’t really care who’s to blame when a new disc won’t play. If they’re going to be asked to embrace Blu-ray, they need to know that the players and discs will work as expected so they can have total piece of mind when they sit back and relax to watch Space Buddies.